Mari Katayama carries out her artistic activities on her two prosthetic legs. She was born with tibial hemimelia, a deficiency in which the major, larger leg bone is absent. As a result, both of her legs were amputated at age 9. Ever since, she has been expressing herself and her unique body’s connection with the surrounding world through her art pieces. With these works, she held her first solo exhibition entitled "you're mine."
Interview: Choosing High Heels with Amputated Legs / Artist, Mari KATAYAMA」
Misconceptions about Life and Personality
However, the photography works created from those circumstances casted another confusion on Katayama.
When people saw the self-portrait they would say ‘Oh, so this is how she lives normally in everyday life.’ But me in the photography is totally far from it. The positioning of the box and the computer, and how I myself position in it—I calculated every single one of those and made a ‘Mari Katayama Portrait.’ It’s really a social side of me and very superficial.
As she started to gather attention, she had more chances to appear in various media outlets, but this left her feeling conflicted.
It was usually like ‘We made a scenario for the program that is like, ‘Ms. Katayama is a very hard-working person. She had it tough, being bullied for having prosthetic legs, but she still did her best through it all. Would you fit into this scenario?’ Because everyone portrayed this ‘tough-girl Katayama’ as ‘the real face’ of me.
Indeed, well, even though my circumstances may seem tough when compared to those of ‘normal people,’ but I take that it was just something I couldn’t change. I never thought I’d like to portray anything like ‘I had it tough!’ That’s why I thought I needed to make it clear that that’s not how it was. I needed to adjust how things were flowing, so I had to make up another ‘social face’ to end misconceptions about my life and personality.
The biggest catalyst was when TV documentary makers filmed her for three and a half years. During the shooting, she had to face a camera for long hours almost every single day, which made her wear a ‘social face’ for every single moment.
At the end of it, she says she was so tired and thought, ‘Please don’t shoot me anymore.’ However, in order to hide her ‘privacy’ that she didn’t want to show, she couldn’t give in at any cost. Thus, she was forced to constantly create a ‘social face’ to show to the camera.
That was probably what tired me out so much. Yes, we all create a ‘social face’ to make things go well in society. What you’re like at the office and what you’re like at home are very different. You even change what type of yourself to show to each of your friends. But at those times, it really made me think a lot why humans were made to function that way.
→Next Page：How She Disappeared into the ‘Normal’
