Yasuko Toyoshima Web Site | WORKS / PrizeCollection

表彰状コレクション（1999）Prize Collection/Certificate Collection

This work features a wall that might typically be seen in people’s homes, where certificates are framed and hung on display. I brought my own certificates from my home into a gallery space to display and treat them as works of art like paintings or calligraphy scrolls. Comprised of all the original certifications I received from the elementary, high school, and university from which I graduated, including a Sunday school I had attended in my youth. They reflect how I was accepted, regarded, and appraised by others according to standards of these systems. These certifications are also the ART produced by the collaboration between these small units of society and myself during those periods of ‘membership’ and participation within these systems. These certificates serve as portraits of the private small societies that I had passed through and of me.