Following up on my previous post about people in cyclops masks, the artist (not the photographer) from the Vice story I linked to is Ozawa Dango, and searching on this name was much more fruitful. From here, I figured out the name in Japanese (小沢団子), and that led to even better results. The above image is from the artist’s website, and the same costume appears in the artist’s Twitter avatar; I assume these are of the artist in character.
According to this profile and this interview, at first the artist made paintings where the figures consisted only of heads and legs, such as the example below (source) and the works shown at the GEISAI #12 exhibit in 2009.
In either 2012 or 2014 (the date is not clear to me) Ozawa started making these masks, and the character is called chimo (or chimo-san, ちもさん, with the honorific). The outfits are custom-made for each client, so the mask I found on Amazon is, I regret to say now, likely a knockoff in the same way that so many other products there are.
Well, it’s just like me to not notice what’s going on until a decade later. But Tumblr’s on the job, and here’s a post from 2014 to prove it!
Since I can’t read Japanese, all this comes by way of Google Translate. So keep in mind that, on top of any errors in interpretation I may have made, machine-translated text can be way off the mark sometimes. Here, the words “Mr. Ozawa” appeared several times in the translations, even though, to my knowledge, no male/female distinction is made in Japanese honorifics. I don't know the artist’s gender.
I’m also learning that which Japanese script you use in a search engine matters. When “tanganmen” is written in katakana as “タンガンメン,” it turns up nothing useful. But when it’s written in kanji as “単眼面,” lots of hits come up.
