![]() More than 200,000 copies of her books have been published. In contrast to this, Mika Ninagawa’s publications connect with a wider audience, although she is not afraid to cross the line and embrace kitsch. ![]() The fish in the series are portrayed as grotesque individuals, as a shimmering mass or as elegantly floating aesthetic beings.Īt first glance, Mika Ninagawa’s work places her in the ranks of Japanese neopop artists, a genre that has gained particular prominence thanks to Takashi Murakami.Įven if artists such as Murakami create products such as T-shirts or watches for the mass market, this mainly occurs within the discourse on art and (Japanese) pop culture and the images of these artists are produced as art for the art and exhibition market. I’ – as a softly smiling young woman with a red hair slide and a satin green dress against a green background, surrounded by red butterflies and holding a deer – a shot that seems to owe a considerable debt to Disney films.īy contrast, in her ‘Liquid Dreams’ series (2004), Ninagawa devotes her photography to goldfish, a traditionally Japanese subject. For instance, she presents the actress Chiaki Kuriyama – known in the West as ‘Gogo Yubari’ from the film ‘Kill Bill: Vol. In her photography, Mika Ninagawa uses elements of Japanese and western pop culture, whether in the design of her motifs or in the extravagant colours of her photographs. Her photography is characterised above all by the use of intense and exuberant colours, such as cobalt blue, pink and blood red which she uses to depict both the motifs and the backgrounds. Mika Ninagawa’s topics include flowers, goldfish, travel and portraits of stars from Japanese entertainment culture. But after just a short time, Mika Ninagawa decided to focus on other topics outside of her direct environment and developed her own visual language. Mika Ninagawa began her career in the mid-1990s as a ‘girly photographer’, a term given to a whole generation of young female photographers between the tender ages of 18 and 20 who used the camera as a means of documenting their own lives and that of their generation. ![]() A retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work opened recently in Tokyo and can be viewed in various Japanese museums up until 2010. Since 1997, she has published 35 photo books and produced television advertisements, CD covers and a music video, as well as directing the feature-length film ‘Sakuran’, which was shown in the special programme of the Berlin International Film Festival 2007. The exhibition includes photographs from her ‘Liquid Dreams’ and ‘Acid Bloom’ series. Within, the images present a visual array of colour and splendor, each capturing its own fragment of an edenic landscape set amongst the backdrop of the memorials of graves, Everlasting Flowers is a vivid portrayal of a garden of life and death seen through the artificial manifests and symbolisms of floral tributes.Galerie Priska Pasquer is proud to present the work of Japanese artist Mika Ninagawa. Published by Shogakukan in 2006, Mika Ninagawa’s Everlasting Flowers takes a look into both the aesthetic and ritual symbolisms of flowers. The boundary between life and death become fragile, and I repeatedly getĪ sensation as though my own silhouette starts to dissolve.Īfter all, it’s pretty easy to cross over the other side." It is the nirvana on earth where the space-time gets twisted, Strong sentiments of the people who wish to hold onto memories of their loved ones, perennial flowers dedicated to those who lived out a given period of time with hope for eternity.įlowers intertwining with grasses bloom toward the blue sky and insects Under the unrelenting blaze of the sun, real flowers will wither afterĪ short period of time. It was the year of 2000 when I first encountered the sight whereĪrtificial flowers were stuck out from the clod of earth covering the grave.įrom then on, for six years, I had continuously paid a visit to grave sitesįlowers featured in this book are all artificial flowers, fake flowers. "Lurid blue sky and violent burst of colors.Ī blurring silhouette, the conviction of having ventured into the other side,
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |