Only You Can Complete Me

Only You Can Complete Me is the result of fieldwork carried out in Japan around the dekotora—heavily customized trucks that have become icons of a flamboyant mechanical subculture. Between aesthetic obsession and popular craftsmanship, the book explores a phenomenon that is both marginal and deeply tied to identity, where excess becomes a language and tuning a manifesto.

Developed during her residency at Villa Kujoyama in 2024, with the support of the Institut français, the Institut français du Japon, and the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation, this project extends a line of research that Louise Mutrel has been pursuing since 2019 on the visual worlds of car tuning in Japan. A member of the Wonder collective of studios, the artist weaves a sensitive and immersive reflection on cultural reappropriation, hybrid imaginaries, and the alternative landscapes these practices bring to light.

The dekotora—a contraction of “decoration truck”—first emerged in the 1970s, under the influence of postwar American culture. Yet the imported model was quickly transformed: in the mountainous regions of Tōhoku, Japanese truckers appropriated these codes to develop a radical visual style, where chrome, neon lights, and hand-painted motifs turned vehicles into rolling works of art. Symbols of freedom, often kept at the margins of cities, these trucks became avatars, totems, and mobile extensions of both individual and collective identities.

With Only You Can Complete Me—whose French texts are fully translated into Japanese—Louise Mutrel goes beyond documentation: she establishes a relationship. The book gathers photographs, personal archives, interviews, and fragments of conversations collected in parking lots, gas stations, and backyards of garages—true sanctuaries of this community. At the crossroads of artist’s book, fieldwork narrative, and cult object, the volume gives form to an unknown, exuberant, and fragile universe, whose light seems to radiate from within.