The exhibition “You Won’t Forget Her!“, a solo exhibition by Kimiko Yoshida, will be on view from June 1 to July 26, 2026, at the GSA/Historical Archives – Museum of Hydra. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition on the island, promoted and organized by the Fondation Valmont.

In Kimiko Yoshida’s work, everything begins with a transformation. Her photographic self-portraits do not aim to describe who she is, but to transcend that identity. Through makeup, costumes, and carefully selected materials, she brings new forms to life, embodying them as if they were her own.

Many of these images echo art history: famous paintings reappear not as copies, but as silent yet resonant reinterpretations. Yoshida enters into them and assimilates them. The result is a suspended image, where the past and the present meet on the surface of the body. Disguise is essential: through her photographs and sculptures, she presents herself as someone else, yet remains unmistakably recognizable.

There is no digital editing in her process, as everything we see happens entirely in front of the lens. Colors, textures, and layers are applied slowly and precisely, while her face is transformed into a place of creation, like a canvas.

Her practice can be viewed alongside artists who have used their own image as a field of transformation: Claude Cahun dissolved the concept of the self through ambiguity; Cindy Sherman constructs identities through staging and disguise. Even earlier, Virginia Oldoini di Castiglione was the first woman to use photography to interpret and reinvent her own image.

You Won’t Forget Her! invites a slow encounter, as these are images that do not reveal everything at first glance, but ask to be observed—and then looked at again—leaving the viewer with a sense of wonder and surprise.

Kimiko Yoshida

Kimiko Yoshida was born in Japan, where she graduated from the Tokyo University of the Arts. She later moved to France, the country she has adopted as her home, where her photographic practice began to take shape. First in Arles, at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, and then in Paris, where she took courses at the Louvre, as well as at Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Tourcoing, she expanded her artistic language, while also drawing on her experience from close collaboration with Japanese fashion designers.

Her companion in life and in her creative work is Jean-Michel Ribettes, a French psychoanalyst and editor, and a friend—among others—of Roland Barthes. Through this closeness, Yoshida came into contact with a wide circle of European intellectuals, shaping a hybrid cultural identity where East and West meet and transform one another.