Saiko Kanda and Hayashi Mayuka have taken a series of X-ray images that aren't aimed at scientific investigation or presenting its figures in a macabre light, but instead add a touch of heart to skeletal images by capturing couples together.
Kanda and Mayuka made this series as their thesis project Musashino Art University and it recently won the Mitsubishi Chemical Junior Designer Award. The images are an interesting mix. The image below feels like a very familiar representation of an affectionate couple:
While other images play with the notion of coupledom, portraying couples in complementary yin-and-yang poses or, in one case, imaging them as ghostly, overlapping doppelgänger. Although the artists say they want to show the "pulse" inside the often sterile X-ray images, in many ways, they are interesting because of what they strip away, the easy identifiers of flesh, hair, and clothing, leaving us to consider these couples are structural beings.
You can see more images from the series at Spoon & Tamago.
X-Ray Portraits of Couples by Ayako Kanda and Mayuka Hayashi [Spoon & Tamago via articulomortis]