Face-Off, 2000
Offset Lithograph
Edition of 50
30 x 22 in
Collaborating Printer: Bob Franklin
In Face-Off, Gayle Tanaka turns her own face into both subject and argument. Across nine self-portraits, she presents the same face in shifting tonal variations — each hue enough, in life, to assign a person to an ethnic category and all the assumptions that travel with it. Laid side by side, the effect is quietly destabilizing. The face does not change. Only the ink does.
Tanaka grew up Japanese American in an otherwise white Chicago suburb, and she has spent her career mapping what it means to move through the world with a face that others read before you have the chance to speak. In this print, she makes that experience visible by making it literal. Skin becomes ink. Ink becomes a layer on paper. And the question she poses is a sharp one: how did something this superficial acquire such profound and often devastating social consequence?
The nine faces function as masks, and like all masks, they simultaneously reveal and conceal. What they point toward, Tanaka insists, is what lives behind the surface — individual, particular, and irreducible to the color of its outermost layer.
