Ogawa Yōko e la bellezza interrotta

The present article reflects on the concept of beauty presented in the earliest works of Ogawa Yōko (b.1962), focusing in particular on the beauty of the body. The body is often the real protagonist of most works of Ogawa, who depicts a world where the real beauty lies in the absence of the beauty itself, showing a new concept of the beauty of the body in complete antithesis with the contemporary idea of perfection dictated by fashion or mass media. Ogawa’s bodies misses limbs, are asymmetric and unaesthetic, that is, they are incomplete. A new form of beauty is given birth in the moment where the interrupted body allows the reader focusing on another part of the same body, as the feet or the ear, and the fetishism comes out. In any case, being the human body subject to aging process, it will die with his beauty interrupted: the only way to preserve it, is to create “specimens” giving bodies a brand new dignity. And the interrupted beauty becomes perfect ad immortal.