Around five years ago on a summer’s day in Tokyo, photographer Mayumi Suzuki was shopping at her local market when she spotted a small display of odd-looking vegetables. Hidden among piles of luscious greens and perfectly round apples was a heap of wonky radishes, stumpy pea-shoots and two-legged carrots—sold at a discounted price. At the time, Suzuki had just given up on In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) and was proclaimed infertile. Looking at these neglected vegetables, she felt a strange sympathy for them. These carrots were still edible, but due to being misshapen, they were deemed to be of a lesser value. “I thought, ‘that’s just like me,’” she says.
So began HOJO, a photography project based on Suzuki’s personal experience with IVF. The work—a haunting sequence of self-portraits, scans, and collage—was published as a photobook last year, and will be exhibited by Kana Kawanishi Gallery at Unseen this week. HOJO is both deeply personal and political. IVF treatment is fraught with stressors: it is expensive, invasive, and many people struggle with the pressure for it to lead to pregnancy. These factors are further amplified in a culture like Japan, where there is a wider lack of awareness surrounding IVF and sexual education.
“People don’t feel comfortable talking about [IVF] in public,” says Suzuki, who sought treatment at the age of 41. “This is just my opinion, but in Japanese society, people are more concerned about how others see and react to them… We’re free to tell people we’re doing IVF. But I didn’t want to tell anyone, because I didn’t want people to know if I didn’t succeed.”
In this context, Suzuki’s work is a radical expression of an experience that is shrouded in stigma—not just in Japan, but all over the world. According to a survey organized by the UK’s Fertility Network, more than 80% of people reported feeling frustrated and worried as a result of fertility problems and/or treatment. Half of these people also experienced suicidal feelings.
Suzuki’s work dives into this psychological landscape. She combines photographs of deformed vegetables with images of her own nude body in postures that allude to pregnancy like the fetal position, or holding her belly. It is crucial to note that these images were made with a large format camera, through a process that incorporates elements from her experience of the IVF procedure.
For example, in one appointment with her doctor, Suzuki was shocked that the examination only lasted 60 seconds. So, she decided to expose her images for the same amount of time. This blurred, ghostly quality achieved by a minute-long exposure offers a poignant comment on the passage of time. While 60 seconds in the examination room feels hasty, in the mechanism of a large-format camera, it reframes the body and the vegetables with care and thoughtfulness.
After treatment, the clinic gave Suzuki four scans depicting her fertilized eggs. Suzuki combined these with an image of a hibiscus bud, which she found on the street. “The flower had fallen before blossoming,” she remembers. “In that moment, I saw the life of a woman who could not fulfill her role.” The artist attached a thin string to the flower to resemble a tampon, and collaged it with her scans. “In the final piece, it looks like a sperm heading toward the egg.”
For Suzuki, photography is an ideal medium to express personal narratives, which have been part of her practice since the beginning. She grew up in Onagawa, a small town in Japan’s Miyagi prefecture, where photography was always part of her daily life. “My parents owned a photography studio… From an early age, I loved watching my father work in the darkroom,” she says. In 2011, all of this was destroyed. The T?hoku earthquake and tsunami swept away her home, the photo studio, and took her parents’ lives. Eventually, she picked up her father’s camera and created a tribute to her family, The Restoration Will. The project eventually became a photobook—a medium that Suzuki feels is “especially suited to telling personal stories.”
With both The Restoration Will and HOJO, Suzuki’s design decisions were intentional at every step—in their sequencing and editing, as well as choice of materials. In HOJO, Suzuki uses transparent paper to incorporate her medical examination data, a collection of abstract graphs. “I printed the results from when we discovered I had a blood disorder. Because of this, I was proclaimed infertile,” she says. Medical terminology can often feel cold, apathetic and detached from the human experience. In real life, the experience of infertility is layered with all sorts of emotional and societal contexts. By including this data in an evocative and ghostly sequence, Suzuki created a juxtaposition, and in turn, the project became transformative. By repurposing fragments from her diagnosis, the artist reframed it into a more relatable human experience.
Similarly, the project’s title reframes the societal pressures surrounding IVF. In Japanese, the term ‘hojo’ [??] refers to a bountiful harvest. Another word with the same phonetic reading—but different characters (??)—refers to fertility. In Japanese mythology, women are worshiped as agricultural deities, and so fertility shares an association with the desire to be blessed with abundant crops. In photographing her own body and the vegetables with the same level of care and aesthetic appreciation, Suzuki subverts this pressure.
“In this day and age, women can choose how they want to live. But sometimes they have to accept a fate that they have no control over,” she writes in the book’s foreword. Thinking back to Suzuki’s initial encounter with the vegetables, her project could be read as an encouragement to challenge our perceptions of what values society deems worthy. “Even if my own body is not ‘fertile,’ I want to be proud of it because this is my life.”
HOJO
by Mayumi Suzuki
Publisher: T&M Projects
ISBN: 978-4-909442-31-4