Between Touch and Distance: The Untranslated Intimacy of Sari Fishman
- Susan Rein
- May 27
- 5 min read
By the time you encounter her—kneeling in the water, her body arched backward, an orange dress clinging to her like a second skin, the same color as her hair, the same color as her latest series—it is The first thing you notice about Sari Fishman isn’t what she says. It’s what she leaves out.
Her work doesn’t explain itself, and neither does she. Which, in a time where everyone seems obsessed with meaning, clarity, and loud declarations of purpose, is not just unusual—it’s unnerving. You’re not sure whether she’s about to confess something or disappear into silence. And that’s the point.
Fishman writes poems that don’t reach for you. They stand still, barefoot, in the middle of the room. If you walk toward them, they stay. If not, they vanish. It’s not a performance. It’s a presence.
Her book Inner Self Portrait—a collection of spare, emotionally precise poems paired with stark, tactile paintings made from tar and nail polish—is a study in modern restraint. But not the elegant, icy kind. No. Fishman’s restraint burns. It’s the kind you learn only after you’ve bled a little too much in public.
The book was originally written in Hebrew, then translated into English—its first unveiling to an international audience. Later came the Italian edition, and most recently, the Japanese. Not because of market expansion. Because of alignment.
Fishman’s work resonates deeply in Japan: not through similarity, but through a shared devotion to the unsaid. The silences. The control. The ache beneath stillness. It’s why, when the translation was complete, a parallel exhibition of the paintings was planned—and why, now, she appears on the cover of this very magazine.
The Japanese edition of Inner Self Portrait will be launched at GR Kitano Art Hub Gallery in Kitano, Kobe—a space that values experimentation as much as excellence. Dedicated to contemporary art and cross-cultural dialogue, the gallery supports artist-led initiatives through both onsite and offsite exhibitions, offering a platform for creative risk-taking and reflection.
The exhibition is presented by Royi Akavia and his partner Gino Moshe, whose curatorial vision embraces artistic authenticity over spectacle. Together, they welcome Dr. Sari Fishman to the gallery, where her visceral, unflinching paintings will be shown in dialogue with the newly translated Japanese edition of her book. More than an unveiling, this is an encounter—with texture, stillness, and the untranslated intimacy that defines her work.
There’s a photograph of her—tailored black suit, red lips, zebra-patterned Christian Louboutin stilettos—on the cover of this issue. You think you’ve seen it before: the strong woman. The art heroine. But look again. There’s defiance in the stillness. There’s hesitation in the boldness. Nothing is whole in Fishman’s world, and nothing is final. That’s her power.
She doesn’t paint with brushstrokes. She pours, scrapes, allows. Tar resists polish. The textures don’t blend; they argue. Her canvases look like something broken trying to remember what it felt like to be loved.
You feel it in the poems, too. A sense of aftermath, like air that hasn’t yet returned to the room.
“I stayed still, so you wouldn’t hear the collapse.”
Except—she didn’t write that line.
It’s how the work breathes.
The actual poem, raw and lucid, reads:
IN THIS WHITE AND NAKED LIGHT
you can hear the body
after the fall as well
void of time
void of place
just a feeling internally revealed
in the night
in the silence
at home
all the stories you told me
return and turn ugly in my head
この白く裸の光の中で
体を聞こえる
落ちた後も
時間が無い
場所が無い
内から表れた感情だけ
夜
静か
自宅
話してくれた物語すべて
頭の中で蘇り
醜いものになる
The story of meeting the translator is also one of spontaneous destiny. Tomiyuki Tanaka—born to a Japanese father and a Russian mother, a rare fusion of seemingly contradictory traditions—brought a quiet clarity to the act of translation. An artist and dancer, he met Fishman in the ambient halls of a dance studio, where her journey into ballroom was just beginning. His sensitivity to the parallel cultures, paired with an intuitive artistic instinct, made him the ideal conduit for bringing Inner Self Portrait into Japanese. Not as a mirror, but as an echo—faithful, resonant, and distinct.
Fishman has visited Japan, both as a tourist and as a biotech executive. She’s walked Kyoto’s alleyways dressed as a geiko. She’s spoken at conferences in Tokyo, sat across from pharma executives with hands as still as tea bowls, and found herself drawn deeper each time—not to the culture, but to the atmosphere. The sensibility.
Her bedroom holds rare Japanese artworks: a limited-edition photograph by renowned artist Natsumi Hayashi—"Today’s Levitation," number 13 of 13, the final print—alongside a lithograph by Yoko Ono titled Dream, created in calligraphy after the tsunami, which hangs above her low Japanese bed. Nearby, a self-portrait taken in Kyoto shows her dressed as a geiko. In the same room, a small low bookshelf contains her collection of LLADRÓ figurines, including two large Japanese geishas.
Her living room is a quiet riot of Japanese authors: Tanizaki, Kawakami, Katayama, Hiraide, Mishima, Tawara, Oe, Yoshimoto, Ishiguro, Kawaguchi—books not just read, but inhabited.
This isn’t aesthetic admiration. It’s a form of belonging that doesn’t require approval. Japan doesn’t inspire Fishman. It reflects her.
What Inner Self Portrait reveals, especially in its global arc, is that intimacy is its own language. It doesn’t translate—it transforms.
Fishman doesn’t write about love, loss, and longing. She writes through them. Her voice doesn’t beg you to care. It assumes you already do, and if you don’t, it turns away—gracefully, like a woman retying her hair after something unspeakable.
The exhibition accompanying the Japanese release will include the book’s original paintings, but don’t expect a gallery full of answers. Expect texture. Expect friction. Expect absence. Her art doesn’t ask to be decoded; it asks to be felt.
And here, finally, is why she’s our cover story. Not because she’s loud. Not because she’s everywhere. But because in a world addicted to disclosure, Fishman has made privacy an art form. She shows what happens when a woman dares to expose only what she chooses—and nothing more.
You don’t finish reading Sari Fishman. You stay near her work long enough for it to undo something in you.
And if you’re lucky, it will.
Credits:
Photography: Diana Meir
Hair & Makeup: Valeria Ov
Styling: Orly Meirovich