photos courtesy mitsubishi chemical junior designer award and the artists

What should have been warm, fuzzy photos of couples are drastically transformed into stark, rather eerie portraits by Saiko Kanda and Mayuka Hayashi. Using an actual CT scan and x-ray machine, the students artists photographed 4 couples, removing the everyday information that we typically perceive. But surprisingly what is revealed is something more than what we would see in a doctor’s office.

“X-ray images usually show the finite nature of our bodies composed only of matter,” say the duo. “But these couples portraits reveal a pulse that isn’t normally seen.” Romantic? No. Intimate? Absolutely.

Kanda and Hayashi conceived the body of work for their senior thesis exhibition at Musashino Art University. They went on to win a prize in the recent Mitsubishi Chemical Junior Designer Award.





[correction] an earlier version of this post mistakenly reported the artist’s name as Ayako Kanda. The correct name is Saiko Kanda.

source: Mitsubishi Chemical Junior Designer Award