原ちけい | Viviane Sassen "Myriads"
Review of Viviane Sassen's solo exhibition "Myriads" at The Mass gallery in Tokyo, examining body representation and the politics of the gaze.Summary
This article reviews Viviane Sassen's solo exhibition "Myriads" at The Mass gallery in Tokyo, running from September 5 to November 8, 2026. Born in Amsterdam in 1972, Sassen has been a pioneering figure crossing the boundaries of fashion and art photography since the early 2000s, re-examining norms surrounding the body and the gaze in fashion photography through her distinctive visual language. Her visual vocabulary is rooted in the strong light and shadows she experienced during her childhood in Kenya; in later works, sharp shadows and vivid colors from strong sunlight in Cape Town, Zambia, and Namibia repeatedly appear, combined with dynamic, irregular posing and collage techniques that fragment the body. Drawing on her own experience as a model during her student years, Sassen deconstructs the asymmetrical "looker/looked-at" relationship inherent in traditional fashion photography by resisting the male gaze and transforming bodies into non-symbolic, object-like images. Her approach shares affinities with contemporary fashion photographers like Collier Schorr, Roe Ethridge, and Tore Bjerregaard, who operate between art and commercial photography with editorial strategies that shift meaning through recontextualization rather than coherent narrative. Notably, Sassen treats optical manipulation through mirrors and acrylic sheets as equal to color-based image construction, echoing Moholy-Nagy's New Vision experiments of the 1920s, while her formal experiments connect to the politics of image consumption and body representation in fashion photography, destabilizing the act of viewing itself for the audience.
(Source：artscape)