It is safe to say that one of the best ways for artists to express their deepest thoughts is to either include their own image in their work or to remark on the outward appearance of others. In so doing, the artist establishes a dialogue between self and the exterior world, and is forced to come to terms with how that self interacts in the public domain and is received by it. Through masquerade, straight portraiture, computer manipulation or other illusionary means, artists constantly depict and reinvent their own and others’ appearances in order to plumb identity. They try on different personae to see what fits, just as they shed those that don’t. In the constant ebb and flow of cultural mores and media imagery, artists from around the world now adopt the trappings of distant cultures as though they were their own. Today’s artists enter the 21st-century with limitless possibilities in terms of who they will be or how they will present or represent themselves. The artists this section of Simulasian have made a career out of analyzing the ways we appear to the outside world, just as they have spent countless hours engaged in introspective investigations on who and what they are. Today’s “Asian” artists celebrate Marilyn Monroe, James Joyce and Nelson Mandela for their role in changing the world just as much as they search their own cultures for reference and inspiration. So too do non-“Asian” artists understand Asia better thanks to the rapid and instantaneous spread of Asian art and culture in an international exchange that is no longer one-way.

Iona Rozeal Brown, who is African-American, born in Washington, D.C., coolly conflates cultural identities, signs and stereotypes. Inspired by the subculture of ganguro, Japanese youth who imitate the gangsta-style of African-American hipsters, Brown has been creating sly, exhilarating variations of her distinctive ukiyo-e-like portraits since 2002---modeled on famous artists and artworks of the genre--that transform classic Asian faces into “yellow negroes” with brown skin, corn rows, extensions, afros, bling-bling, sometimes wearing hip-hop regalia, sometimes dressed traditionally in kimonos. Literally simulasianist, It’s a satiric and stylish blend that reflects today’s cross-referencing, cross-dressing, trans-global, high-low world. Brown’s images also have serious intentions. Her sassy “Afro-Asiatic allegories,” as she designates them, romances the self as both other and mutable. Not merely masquerades--an East-West comedy of unlikely combinations—they are instead representative of new ethnic mixes and global intimacies, of “radically new types of human beings who root themselves in ideas rather than places…” as Salman Rushdie remarked in Imaginary Homelands, a collection of his writings. These human beings’ identities are multiple, harbingers of a new internationalism which in turn, could re-set and revolutionize existing social, political and geographical hierarchies and the hateful intolerance they breed.

Japanese conceptual artist Emiko Kasahara has continuously examined stereotypically-female identity throughout her career. Whether making marble sinks and urinals with nipples sprouting from their undersides or recording collection boxes from churches and religions from around the world as though they were depositories for not only coins but perhaps life as well, she has created works that tie the female corpus to the cultural trappings that shape, refine and limit it. Her work in Simulasian comprises 30 pieces of museum board, upon which 40 small color cubes are painted in striking color. However, Kasahara did not use paint to achieve this effect, for in fact, each of the cubes is laid down in fingernail polish, and arranged in alphabetical order from “accent rose” to “zip zap pink.” Kasahara used polishes from the inexpensive to the high-brow, from Revlon to Chanel and everything in between. She thus takes a substance that women use to decorate their bodies and utilizes it to not only create a vivid work of art, but far more importantly, remind us of the cultural pressure that women are subjected to in order to meet the beauty ideal. Of course, there is nothing wrong with feeling beautiful, but one must be aware of the constructed nature of beauty in order to own it.

New York-based photographer Jeremy Kost has built a career on his Polaroid photos of downtown nightlife, club culture and the celebrities that inhabit that sparkling world. He has recently been working on projects more conceptual in nature, including installation art and paintings, all directly tied to his original Polaroid medium. The works that Kost, a Caucasian photographer originally from Texas, exhibits in Simulasian are enlarged Polaroid images that he shot on a recent trip to Thailand in the fall of 2006. While there, Kost visited several famous nightclubs known for their opulent transvestite revues and was able to photograph the performers both on and off the stage. The candid portraits that he took there show not only the glamorous side of these comely performers, but also reveal their inner personalities shot at moments when they are not necessarily acting, but being real. Kost thus frames the performers as the unique individuals that they are instead of stereotyping them under the bulk title of “Drag Queen” or “Transvestite.” Behind the feathers and the jewels that help to construct the performers’ outward identities, Kost shows us what really goes on behind the pomp and ceremony of a segment of Thailand’s gay subculture.

New York-based artist Tracey Moffatt is well-known for her film works that analyze aboriginal culture and its perception in her native Australia, and indeed beyond. Her own aboriginal heritage is integral to the ways she approaches the topic, and that keen sense of cultural observation has extended far beyond her original works to current projects as well. In 2005, Moffatt made her Under the Sign of Scorpio series in which she acted out the role of 40 well-known women from history and popular culture, who, like her, were all Scorpios. Among them are painter Georgia O’Keeffe, Vogue editor Anna Wintour and assassinated Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Each of the photographic prints in this series finds these luminaries floating in an illusory galaxy akin to the Milky Way. As an offshoot of this series, Moffatt made the Being Scorpio series which shows her posing as her famous subjects in multiple photos arranged as though on a sheet of photographic proofs. This informal behind-the-scenes look provides a campy sense of humor to the pictures, and shows the artist attempting to become a fully different personality. Whether through wigs, makeup, poses or facial distortions, Moffatt does her best to channel the energy of her Scorpio sisters, and shows that she can be anyone that she so desires. A large-scale mural showing all 40 identities that Moffatt enacted for the series is included in Simulasian.

Young Japanese artist Ataru Sato is still an undergraduate at the Kyoto City University of the Arts and will graduate with his BFA next spring. His haunting paintings and drawings are already attracting much attention in Japan and the artist was given his first solo show in New York earlier this fall. Sato’s professor is the animation artist Tabaimo, known for her video installations of whimsical scenes that reference life in contemporary Japan from an equally dark and humorous perspective that borrows on anime as its formal inspiration. Sato too seems to borrow from the imagery of manga and anime, but his works go far beyond the cartoonish nature of these popular entertainment forms in their dark depictions of pieced-together bodies with languid limbs and big void-filled eyes. The installation of 66 drawings on rough scraps of paper pinned directly to the gallery wall mimics the disjointed bodies of which it is composed. Sato uses his vivid imagination to create a world populated by strange beings that give off a brooding nature, no doubt indicative of his generation’s outlook on contemporary Japan and the world beyond.

Emerging Japanese artist Noriko Yamaguchi gets under our skin thanks to what covers hers. A recent graduate of the MFA program at the Kyoto City University of the Arts, this artist from Kobe tackles issues as diverse as technology, mythology and feminism through bodily transformation and endurance. Yamaguchi uses her body to challenge present-day social mores by quite literally camouflaging herself with materials such as red azuki beans, golden thumbtacks and silvery cell phone keypads which become a constructed second skin that acts as a meaning-laden barrier against the world beyond. Yamaguchi’s work is awash in sexual politics due to the extreme modifications she enacts during performances or in front of the camera. In Keitai Girl (2003), included here, the artist dons a skin-tight body suit reminiscent of metallic fish scales that is carefully crafted from cell phone keypads. Her face painted in the traditional powdery white makeup of Butoh, Yamaguchi wears large headphones and is draped from head to toe with wires seemingly ripped from a telecommunications command center, setting her adrift and alone in the ether. The suit, thanks to its digital keypads, begs to be dialed, thus showing the vulnerable position of the artist within the grasp of any number of anonymous hands that might reach out and “touch someone.” In fact, certain guests at her performances are given the telephone number of her body suit and can dial her up from their own cell phones and engage Yamaguchi in conversation. Thanks to the widespread use of cell phones, or keitai, in Japan, Yamaguchi created this suit—a full-body prosthetic that turns her into a walking and talking cellular device—to investigate the future development of the human body and its interaction with technology.

Japanese artist Miwa Yanagi often uses photography as her medium in a body of work that analyzes the role of women in contemporary Japanese society and beyond. Perhaps best known for her Elevator Girls series, one of which is included in Simulasian, Yanagi has also presented the series My Grandmothers which uses computer manipulation and special effects makeup to turn young women into their ideal future grandmother, and the Fairy Tale series that includes frightening monochrome pictures that revisit fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. In all of these series, Yanagi posits her models in strange worlds, some real and others fully constructed. Her work Aquajenne in Paradise II from 1995 is a triptych that depicts several Japanese elevator girls in reddish pink suits seemingly trapped in an underground domed hall with a bank of elevators in the far reaches of the work. Although the custom is fast-fading in Japan, many department stores in that country employed beautiful young women in the 1980s and 1990s to operate their elevators and serve the store’s customers with absolute poise and grace. Like a caged bird of paradise, these young women whiled away their days in the small lifts, forced to smile and serve the entire time. Yanagi takes this theme and expands it, hinting that although they are graceful and beautiful, the elevator girls are still trapped within not only the confines of an elevator, but perhaps held back by society in general. Their uniforms and smiles in fact mask their individual identities, yet their sheer numbers hint that revolution may be on the