Selected Works & Awards

2014

Solo exhibition, Longhouse Projects, New York, USA

2009

Solo exhibition, Gallery HAM, Aichi, Japan

2007

Contemporary Japanese Art, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi/Project 88, Mumbai, India

Exhibition

READ・MADE (1996) consists of ten sheets of paper that have the opening parts of ten novels at the bottom of each piece, and the ends of the books at the tops of the sheets. They were made by taking enlarged photocopies of sections of the books, cutting and pasting the copies to a certain width, and then printing them onto Japanese washi rice paper.

Miwa says that when she read the lengthy stories featured in this work, she got the impression that she was looking down at the text from the sky, as if she were in an airplane flying over a field. After extracting the passages from the books, she reassembled them in a unified format, with blank space in the center and block-shaped chunks of gray space at the top and bottom, so that when all the pieces are arranged in a row, they appear before us like a bird’s-eye view of a unified landscape.

Since the beginning of her career, Miwa has produced works in such a wide variety of styles that it is difficult to believe that they were made by the same person. Based on that approach to her work, one senses her desire to avoid becoming defined as one particular type of artist. Miwaʼs works also seem to be trying to maintain a certain distance by slipping past the viewer’s apprehension and refusing to be fully understood. In this way, the artist may be trying to turn our attention to the act of “seeing” itself.

Miwa mainly works in Aichi Prefecture, but in 1996–1997 she resided in Berlin on a grant from the Philip Morris Foundation, and in 1998 she was selected to be a guest artist under the Swedish art exchange program IASPIS (Stockholm). She held solo exhibitions at Longhouse Projects in New York and Gallery HAM in Aichi, and participated in group exhibitions including Vanishing Points: Contemporary Japanese Art (2007), which toured in New Delhi and Mumbai, India.

• Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2022
• READ・MADE, 1996
• Photo: ToLoLo studio

Exhibition

At the Top of the Mountain (1990) is an imposing oil painting. It was painted based on a photograph published in a mountaineering magazine, but strikes us as more real than the photograph due to its large size and the postcard-style cropping. Collages, each also called At the Top of the Mountain, incorporate postcards of alpine plants that inspire memories of mountaintops, acquired by Miwa’s grandfather at Mt. Ontake. Miwa produced STATUE (2009–2010) by kneading clay into three-dimensional objects and painting them in such a way that the viewer experiences them as if they are busting out from a flat plane, giving the impression of being sculptures, although they are oil paintings. These 3D-like paintings resemble human figures, and emit a certain sense of life and presence. LE BLEU DU CIEL (c. 1987), on exhibit for the first time, was inspired by The Blue of the Sky by French philosopher Georges Bataille. The piece consists of 20 canvases lined up horizontally, with only the upper part of each canvas painted, only in blue, and with horizontal brush strokes visible. The panels are mounted high up, reminiscent of the sky, giving the impression of a tale being told.

Since the beginning of her career, Miwa has produced works in such a wide variety of styles that it is difficult to believe that they were made by the same person. Based on that approach to her work, one senses her desire to avoid becoming defined as one particular type of artist. Miwaʼs works also seem to be trying to maintain a certain distance by slipping past the viewer’s apprehension and refusing to be fully understood. In this way, the artist may be trying to turn our attention to the act of “seeing” itself.

Miwa mainly works in Aichi Prefecture, but in 1996–1997 she resided in Berlin on a grant from the Philip Morris Foundation, and in 1998 she was selected to be a guest artist under the Swedish art exchange program IASPIS (Stockholm). She held solo exhibitions at Longhouse Projects in New York and Gallery HAM in Aichi, and participated in group exhibitions including Vanishing Points: Contemporary Japanese Art (2007), which toured in New Delhi and Mumbai, India.

• Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2022
• LE BLEU DU CIEL, c.1987
• At the Top of the Mountain, 1989
• Photo: ToLoLo studio