All images: Installation view of "Planaria," Property Holdings Development Group, Hong Kong, 2022. Photo by Felix S.C. Wong. Courtesy the artist and PHD Group.
SASAOKA YURIKO: PLANARIA
All images: Installation view of "Planaria," Property Holdings Development Group, Hong Kong, 2022. Photo by Felix S.C. Wong. Courtesy the artist and PHD Group.
The planarian looks deceptively simple. Like most other creatures, it eats, digests, and then excretes its food, but there is a singular difference: while most of us on this earth eventually die, planaria never do.
For years, scientific researchers have studied the quirky, cross-eyed planaria as a model of regenerative growth. Due to a special adult stem cell called a neoblast, the flatworm can reproduce new cells forever, replacing old, dead ones. Even in the event of a trauma—decapitation, loss of more than half a body—planaria are able to grow back fully, sometimes as multiples.
Yet what does it mean to come back, and from what trauma? This creature, and its mythologies of regeneration and body horror, lies at the center of a new series of works by the Kyoto-based artist Sasaoka Yuriko.
In the three-channel video installation Planaria (2021), Sasaoka explores mortality through a surrealist ritual of death and regeneration. At the center of this narrative are 20 handmade dolls with fish heads collected by the artist. These dolls appear alongside 12 new embroidered canvases in a setting that extends from the ambitious, carnivalesque video installation.
Designed and built by Sasaoka herself, the stage, set, and props all play into her distinct visual language, which derives from global theater traditions and subverts monolithic historical narratives. As in her previous seminal work, Icarus’ Bride (2016-19), Sasaoka builds herself into these narratives as both observer and complicit passenger, this time not as a cursed bride but as a tortured figure grappling with the question of what it means to live in a hostile world.
Video clip from Planaria.
Sasaoka Yuriko
Planaria Fish Painting: Electrocution
2022
Acrylic, oil pastel, thread on canvas
21 x 30 cm
Sasaoka Yuriko
Planaria Fish Painting: Falling off Cliff
2022
Acrylic, oil pastel, thread on canvas
30 x 21 cm
Sasaoka Yuriko
Planaria Fish Painting: Explosion
2022
Acrylic, oil pastel, thread on canvas
21 x 30 cm
Sasaoka Yuriko
Planaria Fish Painting: Stragling
2022
Acrylic, oil pastel, thread on canvas
21 x 30 cm
Sasaoka Yuriko
Planaria Fish Doll: Belgium
2020-21
Fish head, resin, fabric, thread, rhinestone
30 x 13 x 4.5 cm
Sasaoka Yuriko
Planaria Fish Doll: South Korea
2020-21
Fish head, resin, fabric, thread, rhinestone
30 x 11 x 4.5 cm
Sasaoka Yuriko
Planaria Fish Doll: Latvia
2020-21
Fish head, resin, fabric, thread, rhinestone
25 x 11 x 4.5 cm
Sasaoka Yuriko
Planaria Fish Doll: Hungary
2020-21
Fish head, resin, fabric, thread, rhinestone
28 x 11 x 4.5 cm
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