Synthesis is a striking artist’s book that brings together six years of work by acclaimed Japanese multimedia artist Mari Katayama. Created between 2019 and 2025 – a period marked by the birth of her daughter and a return to Gunma, the rural province where she grew up – the book brings together nine photographic series, including the brand new Tree of Life, all produced in her home studio. This space becomes both a site of meditation and a stage for transformation. In these intricately composed self-portraits, Katayama places her own body in relation to hand-sewn sculptures, threaded forms, and delicate paper collages. The resulting images are dense with material and memory, each one an act of making in which identity, history, and gesture are stitched together. ‘How do we perceive others, and how are we perceived by others?’ she asks. ‘What is “correct”? What is “natural” and “artificial?”’ Across the book, her practice unfolds as a continual act of transformation – where nothing is fixed or discarded, but rather reshaped and carried forward. This process resonates with the philosophical notion of synthesis in its dialectical sense: a holding-together of opposites, where past and future, beginning and end, presence and absence, are preserved and transcended in new form. At its core, Synthesis is a fierce and intimate celebration of the body – not as static or whole, but as a shifting, powerful site of beauty, resilience, and becoming.
