Reflecting Multiculturalism, Towards a New Horizon

Interviewing Filiz E. Soyak

Pbotographer: Shinsuke Sato  Interview/Text: Yuki Tamura

In the world Filiz E. Soyak creates, one can see the similar exotic Japanese motif throughout. A 23-year-old Filiz, originally born in Belgium between a Turkish father and a Swedish mother, currently bases her work in the U.S.  “My artistic taste was greatly influenced by the art of Japanese culture while I spent a few years of my youth in Japan”, she says.

What touches her most is the tradition, such as kimono, tea-ceremony dishes, and the various rituals. To respect the tradition and not blindly run after what one cannot see.  Filiz tries to express the beauty of repetition through her works. The series Faces began two years ago, the narrow eyes and full lips resembles the women in Ukiyoe. The work filled with rich colors characterizes the female features that may seem similar yet different individually.  According to Filiz, she “attempts to find the diversity/variety within the repetition.”  For a person exposed to various cultures and traveled extensively throughout the world since her youth, this seems to be her long term theme.

Forbidden, a work based upon the lips of geisha mainly using the colors red and black, clearly shows the respect Filiz gives to the tradition of Japan. At the same time, in a general sense, her works focuses on women. At the present, Filiz is creating a new work focusing on “women's abuse” in collaboration with a Swedish journalist residing in Tokyo. “In this case, abuse is the kind of self-abuse women put upon themselves. This is a problem of women caught in an imaginary idea of beauty. I have interests in the reasons women feel the need to go under plastic surgeries using the clostridium botulinum (Botox) and the various side effects that occur from it"  In this work, Filiz's pictures will correspond to what the journalist will write about the different stories behind each woman.  Filiz wishes to tour the exhibit to many places.  Beyond the dividing lines between tradition/present, men/women, step forward towards a new horizon.

How are the young artists going to find ttew ways of expressions on that path?