Wicker Park Artist Bends the Boundary of Personal Art

Yoshie Suzuki cringes at being called an artist.

Instead, she prefers the title "professional rebel."

A graduate student in the video department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Suzuki is a petite Japanese woman often decked in colorful thrift-store finds.

Unassuming, quiet in demeanor, and girlishly young for her 28 years, she giggles discreetly when she finds something funny, and imparts a strong accent when speaking that's adorable at times and hard to understand at others.

Suzuki's work, conversely, isn't quite as innocent. Outside of the art community, her videos are often considered objectionable, sometimes questionable. The videos stretch the boundary of conventional representations of the body by offering a blatant, sexually charged discourse. She shows a John Waters-like subversive fondness for excrement as a subject and has filmed herself kissing complete strangers on the streets of Chicago.

"I'm not interested in art for art's sake," Suzuki says. "And I'm scared of the elitism in the art community. I hate snobbishness. I don't believe art is in the museum. I want to communicate with the person on the street. To me, that is more interesting."

Suzuki's short films use illicit content to evoke a sense of the body's physical urgency, celebrating her risk-taking and her willingness to sacrifice her privacy.

"I see my body as a cultural battlefield," says Suzuki, who frequently exhibits herself in her films. "I want to give something sacred in me to the audience. I want to say, 'I'm there for you.'"

She attributes much of her directorial initiatives to the anxieties from growing up in Japan. Tokyo's uptight, claustrophobic environment is reflected in her work.

"There is so much pressure in Japanese society," she says. "It gets to the point where people become suicidal. Once you step out of line, you want to go all the way."

In 1988, in the middle of her MFA education, Suzuki applied for a leave of absence, and jumped from a stateside art school into the crux of the Japanese pornography industry. She went to work behind the scenes for Kuki, a company that produces a third of the content in Japan's porn industry. It was just after the crash of Japan's market economy, and at a time when the country's teen and pre-teen girls were choosing to sell their underwear, school uniforms, and even bodies for cash.

"Witnessing its results to be more emotional than intellectual, I choose pornography as a means of expression and embrace the role of pornographer for its ability to speak beyond the art crowd and communicate to a populist audience," she says.

Suzuki's concept is to find the most common taboos, and then turns them into products of fetishes. A popular installation was inspired by a kiss from a stranger who rescued her from a suicide attempt on Christmas Eve in London eight years ago.

Already shown in various art galleries all over Chicago, "Vital X: Kissing Project" is a video documentation of an ongoing project in which Suzuki asks strangers to swap saliva with her on camera. "It has to be a passionate kiss," she explains to each partaker, one of whom is now her boyfriend.

"Vital X" captures the surprise of each participant, the voyeuristic nature of the viewer, and a layer of randomness in her candidate selection. Suzuki serves an exhibitionist -- using her body as a commodity to express our very humanness.

"There should be openness of interpretation in my work," she says. "Everyone has different ideas of sexual desires and the sexual self."

Suzuki's statement comes from its creator yielding to her own work. She plays victim, making herself vulnerable to physical servitude; yet she plays swindler, toying with the naked sensations of others and allowing herself the last laugh-the gift of video editing. Really, the social merit of her videos lies in the direct democratization of her art, the use of self.

"I'm not interested in paintings," says Suzuki. "I like accidents. I like natural gestures. I like its truth. That is how I find my way to communicate."

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