Iona Rozeal Brown

In this body of work, Brown continues to explore her fascination with the aspects of Asian culture that surround identity and self expression, specifically that of the 'Ganguro,' a young, Japanese and Korean subculture that dramatically alters their appearance in order to emulate American hip hop icons.

Brown's two most recent series: a3 blackface shunga and w.o.i.m.s. take an explicit look at the power that these cross-cultural dialogues possess. The a3 blackface shunga works parallel the eroticism of 19th century Japanese Shunga woodblock prints and the increasing sexual and chauvinistic nature of hip hop culture. W.o.i.m.s. is an acronym for "Weapons of incoherent mass spending" and directly references the green worms placed around her subjects' bodies. The worms symbolize the means and blind materialism necessary to consume hip hop culture and appropriate its image for cool adulation. On a broader scale, w.o.i.m.s. satirizes the voracious nature of consumer society. Although Brown's work continues to propose that we are all really mirror images of one another, the w.o.i.m.s. series explores the dangers of reducing racial identity to appearance alone.

Iona Rozeal Brown
a3 the revolution... televised, terrorized, and sexualized