A photography exhibition of the artist Kimiko Yoshida opened this week at the Heder Gallery of Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, concurrent with another exhibition of the Japanese-born artist at the Israel Museum. The architect Bobby Luxemburg, an owner of the gallery, says that when you telephone Yoshida at home in Paris to propose that she take part in a project of some sort, she initially says “No.” “When I said that I thought they didn’t say no in Japan, she replied, ‘I came to Paris so that I would be able to say no.’”
“I still feel difficulty saying ‘No,’” says Yoshida during her visit in Israel. “When you want to say ‘I am cold’ in Japanese, you say ‘Cold.’ You don’t say ‘I am.’ Nor can you say ‘You.’ There is nothing personal. Even the words that describe emotions are a lot more abstract than in French, which permits me to express myself with greater precision. In France, I first learned to say ‘No,’ and then to say ‘I’ and finally to do what I wanted to do. I went to Paris to break free.”
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