New Skin, published by MACK in 2020, is Mayumi Hosokura’s square-format paperback: 30 × 30 cm, with a Japanese fold and pages printed in metallic inks. The production is not incidental. It supports a book that treats the page as a place where images are assembled, severed, and reassembled rather than simply displayed.

The project began as one large-scale digital collage. Hosokura drew on clippings from old gay magazines, statues, and found selfies, combining them with her own photographs; she chose images of male figures only. That single collage was then cut into twelve separate pieces. The cut matters: it turns a composite into a sequence of fragments, each carrying traces of the whole while refusing to resolve into a stable portrait or type.

What emerges is a set of hybrid works that unsettle familiar divisions—man and woman, human and animal, living and non-living. Deeply affected by Donna Haraway’s writing, and drawing on feminist theory alongside current technological innovations, Hosokura proposes another way to think about identity, the body, and desire. The book does not illustrate a thesis so much as stage a set of visual and conceptual pressures, asking what “human” might mean when digital and bio-technologies are changing the terms.

For collectors, New Skin rewards attention to its structure as much as to its individual images. The Japanese fold and metallic inks give the object a deliberate material character; the twelve-part sequence makes reading a cumulative act. Hosokura’s use of found and authored photographs raises questions about authorship and image circulation, while the book’s speculative frame places it within ongoing conversations about embodiment and technology. It is a considered photobook from MACK, and its significance lies in that convergence of format, argument, and image-making.