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Artist's commentary
My dress-up doll
When I was a child, I absolutely loved the dress-up dolls that often came as supplements to magazines and girls' comic books.
All children "role play" as lots of different things. Personally, my friends and I used to get engrossed in hand-moved paper dolls, playing as a lovely cake shop owner, a princess or a bride. I used to think about the things I could do with any photos that I saw, and after coming home from school I would take magazines, flyers etc and cut out any clothes or shoes that I liked and collect them in my special photo file to play with.
I even kept doing this in middle school, but gradually I came to dislike myself. My face, my figure, my voice, my personality, and the way I carried by body. I didn't want to make people feel weird, so I didn't tell my parents or friends but I truly hated everything about myself.
But if I held my own body up to those photographs, then I could turn into the singers I liked, into a model, into my close friends, even into the opposite sex. I didn't really become them, but I took comfort from them, and it was kind of fun, filling my desk with these superimposed collages.
But I've never shown them to anyone, and those transparent files are still somewhere in that room, with piles of the photo collage simulacra that I made in those days. When I think about it like that it sounds kind of creepy, but I also feel nostalgic about it. I wonder if those piles are who I am now.