After enrolling in the Kyoto City University of Arts, Sudo studied in France as an exchange student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
[1] She says various Japanese arts, such as Takarazuka Revue and casual Kabuki, where actors take on roles of the opposite gender, inspired her gender-bending photographs.
[1] While some of her works are gender-fluid, others invoke dreamlike femininity and are heavily inspired by Japanese kawaii, Lolita, and Harajuku culture.
She titled this series, Gespenster, from the German word for ghost, which she encountered while reading Junichiro Tanizaki's book The Makioka Sisters.
In his capacity as a judge for the New Cosmos of Photography Competition, Noi Sawaragi, Japanese art critic, observed that Sudo captures the "dangers faced by and the fragility of the young generation in Japan through the gap that cannot be filled between the missing girls who have become eternal beings who will never age and artist who, herself is aging, plays the role of missing girls."
For Sudo, "the eccentricity that is part of the Kawaii aesthetic is achieved mainly by combining the typically drawn two-dimensional images of shojo-manga with the innate hyperrealism of post-photographic media, namely, Photoshop and other forms of digital manipulation."
This effect creates portraits that seem to look artificial and human simultaneously; Astrachan connects this idea to Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud's dispute regarding the uncanny through the analysis of The Sandman by E.T.A.
[6] Astrachan explains how Sudo's works can be understood to subvert "conventional ideas of beautify and body images" in the changing normative environment regarding cosmetic surgery.
Astrachan builds on Mori's technologically oriented Uncanny Valley Effect by framing it within evolving societal norms regarding artificially modified bodies.