In the early 1950s, Toshiko Okanoue took her scissors to a
stack of lifestyle and fashion magazines, cutting out photographs from Life, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar and arranging them in unsettling collages. Western
magazines were readily available in Japan in the period after World War II when
the country was still occupied by American troops. They became the raw
materials for her personal fantasies, echoing Surrealist works made in the
aftermath of World War I by artists such as Max Ernst. Okanoue often placed
Western women in disastrous situations full of jarring juxtapositions—a glamorous
woman gazing directly at the viewer in the collage here gives an intense
psychological drama to the scene of a shipwreck.