Shintaku Kanako, a Japanese artist, pours paint over her nude body to create vividly colorful images. She often marks them with the caption "I'm still alive." The creation of these living paintings is a performance art piece, as you can see from this video of Kanako painting herself in the woods.
Spoon & Tamago explains how these performances express the artist's journey out of a troubled childhood:
Eventually, to cope, she learned to separate her mind from her body, creating a state of consciousness that was somewhere in-between life and death. But our skin is like an antenna, she says, and by covering it in paint, the artist is able to confirm that, indeed, she’s still alive. Her solo exhibition in Kyoto last summer was titled “I’m still alive.” The extremely personal performance is her antidote to the painful human experience.
Shintaku’s performances run between 4 and 8 hours. Every 20 or 30 minutes, after the previous layer of paint dries, the artist applies a new layer, allowing it to drip down her body. She mixes starch into her paints to create more viscosity.
Content warning: artistic nudity in the links.
Photo: Yuji Imamura