Fumie Sasabuchi was born in 1975 in Tokyo, where she studied art at Tama Art University from 1995 to1999, before continuing her education at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. She currently lives and works in Berlin.

In one of Sasabuchi’s signature works, a retouched fashion magazine page transforms a model into a figure enmeshed in a cosmic vanitas tableau. Surrounded by domestic symbols traditionally associated with femininity—kitchen utensils and cabinets—she hovers between roles of innocent beauty or complicit co-conspirator. Whether Father Time looms as a harbinger of decay or appears as her accomplice in a romantic masquerade, the image underscores the ephemerality of beauty and fashion.

A winged serpent—emblem of eternity and cyclical renewal—hovers above her jewelry-adorned hand, perhaps hinting at a more hopeful reflection on impermanence. Is the fashion model a symbol of resilience or repression, empowerment or commodification? Sasabuchi’s deliberate ambiguity invites us to question whether our protagonist embodies female victory or vanquishment.