Takahiro Oyama

Born in 1993 in Iwate. Master's degree in sculpture, Tohoku University of Art and Design, majoring in arts and culture. In recent years, he has been creating wood carvings and woodblock prints based on the motif of drag queens and reconstructed images by covering and referring to folklore studies and traditional performing arts in Tohoku, where she is from. It depicts people with conflicting beauty and contradictions.

They are creating a work called “Drag Queen” (Drag Queen) with the motif of a transvestite performer mainly by gay men. Wearing flashy makeup, a costume that makes you slide, and high heels that seem to fall, Drag Queen easily jumps over the “sexual barrier” with her exaggerated femininity. I felt the “brilliance” of people who live powerfully with “heterogeneous beauty” in that expression born from severe discrimination and self-conflict. The beauty unique to Drag Queen was examined from a cultural perspective and reconstructed using an expressive method called wood carving.