Uemura, Shoen

This print, bearing the artist's own name as its title, may be a self-referential work, possibly a self-portrait or an artwork created for a retrospective publication or catalogue. Shoen's identity as an artist was inseparable from her subject matter: she painted women, she was a woman, and her life's work was an argument that feminine beauty and feminine experience constituted serious artistic territory. If this is a self-portrait, it would be a rare document of how Shoen saw herself, distinct from the many photographs taken of her during her celebrated career. The print carries the particular weight of an artist naming herself as subject, collapsing the distance between the women she spent decades observing and depicting and her own presence as observer and creator. Shoen's entire oeuvre can be read as an extended meditation on what it means to look at women, and to be a woman who looks.