Izima Kaoru

“Behind this lies not just impact or drama, but a typically Japanese tendency. The story of Pygmalion, the Greek myth — in which Pygmalion falls in love with the statue of a young woman that he creates and which is hen transformed into a human by Aphrodite who imbues it with life — represents a Western approach in which the statue represents the human body. In Japan, however, there is a unique predilection for dolls ... This can be interpreted as a decadent, necrophiliac erotic story but it can also be interpreted as a propensity for Japanese men to fall in love with figures. These men's desires are directed at the figure for the very reason that it is a doll. The overwhelming passivity of the doll is a reflection of the behavior of a certain type of Japanese man whose immaturity makes it very difficult for him to establish an equal relationship with a mature woman.”

“Izima's elaborate stagings of these exotic murder scenes had their genesis through a series of processes, from inspirational idea through imagination, to intention, and then initiation. The ascendant 'i' here might well be symbolic of Izima's 'I,' or ego, as he both composes and conducts these visual compositions, the sole purpose of which is to transfix and seduce the viewer's 'eye.”

“If we start to look into the nature of the relationship between time and the dynamics of social exchange, we quickly discover that temporal considerations are equally important as spatial ones when examining the causes of disjunction that can separate familiarization and alienation. Synchronization, it seems, is often in thrall to serendipity — temporal disjunction, like entropy, is one of the irresistible forces of nature.”