Aiko Miyawaki

was a Japanese sculptor and painter. She was best known for her sculpture series titled Utsurohi, installed at public spaces worldwide.

Biography Early years Born Aiko Araki in Tokyo, Miyawaki moved to Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture with her family at a young age. Miyawaki was known to be a weak child, and her family changed her given name several times to make her stronger. She was once Takako during kindergarten years and then Mikiko when she started school. In March 1946, Miyawaki graduated from the Odawara High School for Girls (now Odawara High School). At Japan Women's University, she studied with historian Noboru Ōrui in the Department of History and her thesis focused on the art of the Momoyama period. She graduated in March 1952. The two got married while still in school; they separated in 1960 and divorced in 1965. Through Gio Ponti’s daughter Lisa Ponti, Miyawaki was connected to the Galleria Minima in Milan, where she would later have a solo exhibition in 1961.

In January 1962, Miyawaki temporarily returned to Japan and held her second solo exhibition in Japan at Tokyo Gallery. Miyawaki got acquainted with Man Ray either around this time in Paris, For the exhibition, Miyawaki showed Work (ca. 1966) in which she superimposed triangles made of aluminum and melamine resin to create a three-dimensional representation of perspective in a plane.

In November 1968, Miyawaki exhibited a work titled Shindō (振動, "Vibration") at the 5th Nagaoka Contemporary Art Museum Award Exhibition. Around this time, Miyawaki was also creating works with different themes depending on the material. For example, in the MEGU series, each work consisted of a stack of glasses that are collected broken, as opposed to having been manually cut which would not result in the transparency of the entire sculpture that she had planned for. The Listen to Your Portrait series involved Miyawaki engraving "Listen to your portrait" in the language of the country where the work was exhibited on triangular metal or stone plates.

After that, Miyawaki was invited to enter a sculpture competition organized by the Port Authority in New York. For that project, she experimented with the idea of expressing the free spirit, or "qi (chi)" in Chinese, as if drawing lines in the void.

Utsurohi (うつろひ) In March 1980, UTSUROI, the first work of Miyawaki's signature Utsurohi series was installed in Hikoda Children's Park in Ichinomiya, Aichi Prefecture.

In May 1980, in the exhibition Aiko Miyawaki 1960–1980, held at Gallery Takagi in Nagoya, Miyawaki exhibited a new work made of stainless steel wire in almost the same shape as UTSUROI. This time, she herself did the installation at the exhibition venue. In 1990, Utsurohi was installed in the square in front of the Sant Jordi Sports Palace, which was designed by Isozaki for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. In 1994, together with Shūsaku Arakawa and Kazuro Okazaki, Miyawaki installed the work at the Isozaki-designed Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art in Okayama.

Miyawaki died on 20 August 2014 of pancreatic cancer at a hospital in Aoba-ku, Yokohama. She was 84 years old. In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Utsurohi installation sites Gunma Museum of Modern Art, Takasaki South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, California Princeton Mobil Oil Research Center Leon Pierre Boulez Square, Siena Park, Colorado Houston Pitman Sculpture Garden La Défense, Paris Sant Jordi Sports Palace Square, Barcelona Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art, Okayama Main Forum, Frankfurt

Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art, Okayama Museum Haus Kasuya Bohemian's Gallery Toki-no-Wasuremono