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中村豊美は、競争社会での生存戦略が生み出した欲望の存在を明らかにする写真家、画家である。自然界において淘汰されまいとする花々のように、美しさを追い求め、命の最後の瞬間まで愛し愛されることを欲している。写真と絵画、具象と抽象を融合をさせ、日本独自の「陰翳礼讃」の美意識のもと、闇の中に佇む花を女性にみたて、映画のワンシーンのようなアート作品を創造している。そこでは、光と闇、愛と憎しみ、抑圧と解放、依存と孤独など、全ての双極と矛盾を受け入れる心模様が表現される。

かつて女優だった彼女は17歳で夢をあきらめて舞台を降りる決意をし、自分の舞台は自らが作ると決めて、セルフポートレート撮影を開始する。その後、ポートレートを中心にカメラマンとして活動。このドラマティックな世の中を愛しぬくためにはストーリーが必要と考え、被写体に役柄を与え、演出家になることにした。カメラマンから写真家に転身した彼女の作品は男と女の「陰陽芸術®️」をテーマとする。また画家でもある彼女のライブペインティングでは、ひとりで何役もこなす芝居仕立てで、心象を語りながら、生きた言葉と踊る色を重ねていく。

ジェンダーレスな現代社会に生きながらも「女に生まれてよかった」と心の底から幸せに感じる瞬間を、自分自身の生き様を通じて世界中の人々と共有していきたい。そんな彼女の作品には、輝きを分かち合い、孤独に寄り添う、大いなる母なる愛が感じられると評価されている。

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Toyomi Nakamura is a photographer and painter who reveals desires created by survival strategies in a competitive society. She pursues beauty and yearns to love and be loved until the last moment of life, just like flowers striving to defend themselves from the natural world. She fuses photography and painting, figurative and abstract expression based on the aesthetic of In Praise of Shadows that is unique to Japan. Her work resembles scenes from movies, using an image of a flower standing in the darkness as a woman figure. What she portrays in her work is the state of mind that accepts bipolarities and contradictions, including light and dark, love and hatred, repression and liberation, and dependency and solitariness.

Formerly an actress, she gave up her dream and decided to leave the stage at 17. Having determined to be in charge of staging her own work, she started taking self-portraits. Accordingly, she became a photographer who mainly takes portraits. Believing that it takes stories for us to love this world full of dramas, she made herself a director who gives roles to the subjects of her photography. Shifted from merely taking portraits to incorporating elements of conceptual art into her photography, she creates works under the idea of “Yin-Yang Art ®️.” Also a painter, she performs live painting as a drama where she plays multiple roles, sharing her mental landscape and layering words that are alive and colors that dance.  

Through her own life, she hopes to share with people around the world the moments she feels genuinely happy that she was born as a woman, living in a modern society that grows genderless. Created under such a hope, her works have been acclaimed as embodying the motherly love that spreads its radiance and accompanies the viewers in their loneliness.