At first sight, one might come to the conclusion that the figures haunting Asami Shoji’s images are doubles. In truth, we are more likely to be witnessing astral projections, out-of-body experiences, figures being torn apart or tearing themselves apart. The double is never an alter ego, who might become an intermediary, but is the object of a process, of a transformation. They are never situated in front of the central characters, but rather behind, above or below them. These creatures that emerge change color, shrink, melt, burn…

The intensity in Asami Shoji’s work lies in this ripping asunder. With audacity and inventiveness, she proposes decapitations and a multiplication of heads. Her creations bring to mind Saint Denis walking with his head in his hands. We might also be reminded of the changing identities in the cinema of Kiyoshi Kurosawa: the film Kairo (2001), where disaffected youth become victims of “phantomization,” a combination of taking on ghostly form and a process of atomization, finally disappearing as black ash projected onto walls, disintegrated, disarticulated, liquefied…

The editing and cutting effects are reminiscent of cinematic art, of the intentional continuity errors that amplify plays on scale, the use of recto-verso effects and high and low angled shots. Except that in Asami Shoji’s work, everything happens in the same fixed, painted rectangle, not spread out over time but compressed into a limited space, as if on a palimpsest, juxtaposing different strands of potential existence. Here and elsewhere, the present, past and the future coexist in impossible images that contradict the logic of time.

amongst all the runs, spatters and liquid slicks of paint and oil, sex conserves its tragic privilege as the primary source of original conflict. As Roland Barthes states in his On Racine “The image is repeated, never transcended.” This is undoubtedly the meaning of these images of the double and duplication, the endless repetition of the same trauma. Images of the original opposites are reiterated: those of masculine and feminine, black and white, the diabolical and the angelic, dramatic intensity and casual indifference. The same reversal of one thing into its opposite can equally be seen in the use of complimentary colors: red and green, yellow and purple, which also express the shift from one side to its inverse. The multiplication of heads and arms also embodies this reversal, this turnaround of appearances. In Asami Shoji’s world, “to be, is not only to be divided, but to be reversed.”

— Clélia Zernik