I have been terrible at maintaining my old website that I have decided it is time to just start afresh. Thanks so much to Abby Storey for allowing me to use her website template for my old site but in the end I found the html to complex to update regularly. Hopefully, now I am using tumblr I will be more disciplined and keep it up to date. I plan to keep exhibitions up to date as the happen and they will be linked in the menu to the left and I will occasionally update new here.
About
markleonardwatts@gmail.com
(+64) 21 227 3926
Mark grew up in Birmingham, UK, Lived in Wales, Sweden, Japan and is currently a resident of New Zealand. He has a bachelor of Humanities with Honours from The University of Glamorgan in Wales and a Masters of Art and Design from Auckland University of Technology.
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Essay from Photo Forum NZ members magazine Momento by Billie Lythberg:
Mark Watts: Cosplay (2008), The imagined life of an otaku collector, or to be a cosplay star (2008), and Hero of Nippon (2009).
Through his photography and from personal experience, Mark Watts’ explores the place of the foreigner in Japanese culture. Watts has lived in Japan, speaks Japanese, and recently married his Japanese wife in a traditional Japanese wedding ceremony, but his apparent integration into Japanese culture is unsettled by his photographic self-portraits. These convey succinctly, and with sensitivity, the ambivalence he continues to experience as a Western man in Japan.
Watts began his visual exploration of this complex personal predicament through ‘cosplay’, a type of performance art in which participants dress up in Japanese costumes, often drawn from popular culture media such as anime and manga. For his Cosplay (2008) series Watts photographed himself dressed as a ‘salary-man’, ramen chef, Japanese schoolgirl, and in a woman’s formal kimono, to demonstrate visually the awkwardness of the foreigner in Japan.
But when the resulting images were too easily dismissed as ‘drag’ and failed to achieve the kawai (cute) look that Watts felt was equally as important to his project, he began instead to superimpose his face onto diminutive Japanese dolls. The resulting series, The imagined life of an otaku collector, or to be a cosplay star (2008), and Hero of Nippon (2009), achieve the kawai look Watts desired, and simultaneously unsettle it. The dolls are kawai but Watts is not. But there can be no denying his gamine beauty in these images: his porcelain skin, sculpted face and moulded goatee. While he unsettles our view, he does so with subtlety and finesse.
When we look closer we discern references to the actual size of the dolls Watts uses. Their molding seams become visible and their detailing seems a little clumsy. Of all the dolls Watts has co-opted for his artwork none is more than 80mm high and though some seem implausibly pneumatic they are in fact based on 14-year-old girls. Watts toys with this by reproducing the dolls in interior settings, posing them on mantle-pieces and shelves, allowing us to inspect them as though through his magnifying lens: an invitation into voyeurism.
Yet all but one of Watts’ self-portraits evade the viewer, casting their eyes beyond us to their imagined lives. They are inscrutable, deliberately ignoring their audience, engaged in an alternate reality. Watts makes eye contact only in Kowareta (2009), a dismantled cheerleader, in a work recently selected as a finalist in the Wallace Art Awards. Though pathos is evident more generally in Watts work, in Kowareta it is more tightly focused, suggestive of the Japanese artistic concept mono no aware. Invented by Motoori Norinaga, an eighteenth-century literary and linguistic scholar, mono no aware describes the unmediated and sympathetic understanding of beauty as unsatisfactoriness, impersonality, and impermanence, best exemplified by Japan’s adoration of the fleeting cherry blossom. Perhaps the cheerleader is able to meet our eyes precisely because she is kowareta (broken): unique amongst Watts’ self-portraits, Kowareta embodies impermanence and imperfection, and appears to have lost sight of her imagined world and personality.
Despite denying eye contact each of Watts’ self-portraits communicates a complex expression, albeit through Watts’ own face. For each shot Watts placed himself entirely into the character of the doll, posing his body and attempting to take on its thoughts. The dolls appear immersed in their own world, granting Watts permission ‘to live vicariously through the heroes’ image’. The resulting self-portraits are freakishly successful, and his technical mastery is evident in the seamless juxtaposition of his own features onto the dolls’ bodies with such delightful visual trickery.
Ultimately these portraits are not Watts: they represent his own feelings of ambivalence in what is arguably his second home, interrogating issues relating to the Western gaze, and cultural and gender stereotyping. Watts’ works may be kawai but they are also complex and compelling, demonstrating the conceptual subtlety of an artist who does not underestimate his audience and does not overestimate himself.
Billie Lythberg MA (Hons) GradDipArtsOctober 2008.
(+64) 21 227 3926
Mark grew up in Birmingham, UK, Lived in Wales, Sweden, Japan and is currently a resident of New Zealand. He has a bachelor of Humanities with Honours from The University of Glamorgan in Wales and a Masters of Art and Design from Auckland University of Technology.
———————————————
Essay from Photo Forum NZ members magazine Momento by Billie Lythberg:
Mark Watts: Cosplay (2008), The imagined life of an otaku collector, or to be a cosplay star (2008), and Hero of Nippon (2009).
Through his photography and from personal experience, Mark Watts’ explores the place of the foreigner in Japanese culture. Watts has lived in Japan, speaks Japanese, and recently married his Japanese wife in a traditional Japanese wedding ceremony, but his apparent integration into Japanese culture is unsettled by his photographic self-portraits. These convey succinctly, and with sensitivity, the ambivalence he continues to experience as a Western man in Japan.
Watts began his visual exploration of this complex personal predicament through ‘cosplay’, a type of performance art in which participants dress up in Japanese costumes, often drawn from popular culture media such as anime and manga. For his Cosplay (2008) series Watts photographed himself dressed as a ‘salary-man’, ramen chef, Japanese schoolgirl, and in a woman’s formal kimono, to demonstrate visually the awkwardness of the foreigner in Japan.
But when the resulting images were too easily dismissed as ‘drag’ and failed to achieve the kawai (cute) look that Watts felt was equally as important to his project, he began instead to superimpose his face onto diminutive Japanese dolls. The resulting series, The imagined life of an otaku collector, or to be a cosplay star (2008), and Hero of Nippon (2009), achieve the kawai look Watts desired, and simultaneously unsettle it. The dolls are kawai but Watts is not. But there can be no denying his gamine beauty in these images: his porcelain skin, sculpted face and moulded goatee. While he unsettles our view, he does so with subtlety and finesse.
When we look closer we discern references to the actual size of the dolls Watts uses. Their molding seams become visible and their detailing seems a little clumsy. Of all the dolls Watts has co-opted for his artwork none is more than 80mm high and though some seem implausibly pneumatic they are in fact based on 14-year-old girls. Watts toys with this by reproducing the dolls in interior settings, posing them on mantle-pieces and shelves, allowing us to inspect them as though through his magnifying lens: an invitation into voyeurism.
Yet all but one of Watts’ self-portraits evade the viewer, casting their eyes beyond us to their imagined lives. They are inscrutable, deliberately ignoring their audience, engaged in an alternate reality. Watts makes eye contact only in Kowareta (2009), a dismantled cheerleader, in a work recently selected as a finalist in the Wallace Art Awards. Though pathos is evident more generally in Watts work, in Kowareta it is more tightly focused, suggestive of the Japanese artistic concept mono no aware. Invented by Motoori Norinaga, an eighteenth-century literary and linguistic scholar, mono no aware describes the unmediated and sympathetic understanding of beauty as unsatisfactoriness, impersonality, and impermanence, best exemplified by Japan’s adoration of the fleeting cherry blossom. Perhaps the cheerleader is able to meet our eyes precisely because she is kowareta (broken): unique amongst Watts’ self-portraits, Kowareta embodies impermanence and imperfection, and appears to have lost sight of her imagined world and personality.
Despite denying eye contact each of Watts’ self-portraits communicates a complex expression, albeit through Watts’ own face. For each shot Watts placed himself entirely into the character of the doll, posing his body and attempting to take on its thoughts. The dolls appear immersed in their own world, granting Watts permission ‘to live vicariously through the heroes’ image’. The resulting self-portraits are freakishly successful, and his technical mastery is evident in the seamless juxtaposition of his own features onto the dolls’ bodies with such delightful visual trickery.
Ultimately these portraits are not Watts: they represent his own feelings of ambivalence in what is arguably his second home, interrogating issues relating to the Western gaze, and cultural and gender stereotyping. Watts’ works may be kawai but they are also complex and compelling, demonstrating the conceptual subtlety of an artist who does not underestimate his audience and does not overestimate himself.
Billie Lythberg MA (Hons) GradDipArtsOctober 2008.
