In the tradition of Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, and more recently Nikki Lee, Sawada plays a host of characters and identities in her self-portraits. With each new get-up she transforms into someone else.

In the ID-400 series, reminiscent of Andy Warhol's photo-booth portraits from the 1960’s, Sawada used a public photo booth to create an "army of me," - but not me. She spent weeks continually changing her physical appearance and dress to invent a total of four hundred different new identities. The facial characteristics and expressions are so varied and elastic in these candid shots that they become in of themselves a subtle study of physiognomy.

Tomoko Sawada lives and works in Japan. Recently, her works were exhibited in prominent group shows at ICP and the Japan Society.