Futoshi Miyagi

is an Okinawan artist and writer. He works in various mediums, such as photography, objects, video and text, to construct narratives on the subjects of sexual minorities and untold stories in history, often in relation to Okinawa. Much of Miyagi's earlier work is inspired by his own memories and coming to terms with his identity as a gay Okinawan man. Over the course of his career, Miyagi has increasingly expanded the range of his subjects to include imagined characters and historical figures. Miyagi is most known for his American Boyfriend Series, an ongoing project that addresses the topic of queer relationships through narrative form. The series, a culmination of Miyagi's multidisciplinary approach, consists of a blog, numerous video works, and a novel, and mimics the evolution of his oeuvre from semi-autobiographical to historically based fiction. Miyagi takes influences from a wide range of arts and media, including the work of feminist writers and artists Lucy Lippard and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, contemporary artists Félix González-Torres and Ryan McGinley, and classical composers Bach and Beethoven. For his photographs and video work, Miyagi has been recognized as a finalist for the Kimura Ihei Award and the Nissan Art Award.

In addition to his art practice, Miyagi is active in the art community as a writer and serves as the co-director of the artist run gallery space, XYZ collective in Tokyo.

Early life and education Miyagi was born and raised in Kumejima, Okinawa. After graduating from high school, Miyagi studied at a language school in Osaka designed to help Japanese students enroll in American universities. While in Osaka, Miyagi experimented with photography for the first time using a LOMO camera he bought during a rise in the popularity of blog culture and lomography. With his camera, Miyagi wandered around his neighborhood at night to shoot but felt that his lack of knowledge left him with primarily blurred "unsuable" photographs. Miyagi later went to New York in 2003 and initially considered a degree in journalism. He felt that his hometown of Okinawa and the small community of Kumejima was not accepting of homosexuality. It was also a means for Miyagi, whom struggled in bars and parties, to connect with the gay community. For his breakout series and coming out project Strangers (2005–2006), Miyagi instead relied on online sites such as Gay.com, Friendster, and the "men seeking men" sex section on Craigslist to solicit volunteers who would allow him into their home to take photographs together. In his orchestrated images, Miyagi and his photographed partners are typically juxtaposed within a bedroom or bathroom with their expressions far off in separate places. The photographs, said to elicit feelings of unease and awkwardness, have been lauded for their ability to encapsulate the "double identity crisis" Miyagi was experiencing in both his journey coming out and his status as a foreigner.

Following Strangers, Miyagi continued to engage with photography but rather than being a declaration of his identity, he experimented with photography as an investigation of personal memory. For the artist statement of Untitled (Self-Portrait, Twelve Rolls of Exposed Film) (2006), in which Miyagi exposed the film negatives of self portraits to light before they were developed, Miyagi uses a quote from Daidō Moriyama to suggest that through destruction (of the image) there is possibility for the memory of something new. These works were early examples of Miyagi's interest in the process of removal or absence and the subsequent potential for creating new meaning, which came to serve as guiding theme throughout the remainder of his career. Between 2006 and 2007, he manipulated photographs in various methods to create photo-objects that resulted in the obscuration or erasure of the initial image. Some of his manipulations include burning a personal photo album, removing himself from prints using bleach, and shredding a photo of his hometown to use the scraps for a collage work.

Career in Japan Due to visa complications, Miyagi returned to Japan and relocated to Tokyo in 2007. In other works absence is expressed through the use of every day objects, such as empty glasses and used cigarette butts, that evoke the presence of a person or relationship that is not directly shown. Miyagi's use of repetitive actions and common objects was partially influenced by the work of American feminist writers and artists such as Lucy Lippard and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, especially the latter who sought to reframe daily actions and life as an extension of her art practice.

From the late 2000s onwards, Miyagi also began to combine his personal experiences with the stories of fictional characters, notably a relationship he had with an imagined AWOL soldier in Okinawa. Miyagi presented numerous photographs and object works meant as belongings of the fictional soldier and also provided narrative details of their interactions. This invented relationship with a US soldier was a precursor to his highly regarded and multi-year project American Boyfriend Series.

American Boyfriend Series American Boyfriend Series was launched in 2012 when Miyagi started writing a diaristic blog considering the possibility of romance between an Okinawan man and a male American soldier. There Miyagi wrote that one of reasons for his blog and the imagined romance was to understand why Okinawan society was so hostile to homosexual relationships and concealed them.

Miyagi went on to create five video works for American Boyfriend Series: Ocean View Resort (2013), A Romantic Composition (2015), Flower Names (2015), How Many Nights (2017), and The Dreams That Have Faded (2018). Similar to the progression of the blog, the evolution of the video works increasingly expanded outward from personal experiences to those of numerous mythical, fictional, and historical figures. While the characters and settings of each work differs, most of the stories include undertones of suppressed queer desire and Miyagi's ruminations on possible people and relationships that might have existed but weren't saved or popularized in the records of history. Miyagi's outward move was a result of his finding that many of the issues that arose when researching the possibility of relationships between men in Okinawa were universal, and through a narrative approach, Miyagi could present stories from times and places completely different from himself.

Under the American Boyfriend Series, Miyagi also released the novel Distant (2019) which was compiled from three connected stories he published prior in the literary magazine Bungei: Scenes from America (Bungei, 2017 summer), I See a Darkness (Bungei, 2017 autumn), and Stranger (Bungei, 2018 autumn). The video transitions to a memory of cruel acts committed by Japanese soldiers during the war. The relationship between the narrator and Y is loosely based on Miyagi's own experiences of unexpressed love for a friend. The melding of personal history and larger Okinawan history was an attempt by Miyagi's to find a way relate to the island's way history which he and his generation felt largely disconnected from.

A Romantic Composition (2015) A Romantic Composition presents the fictional relationship between an Okinawan pianist and American Vietnam veteran, also an amateur violinist, and the friendship they developed together after a night spent drinking, playing music and watching movies at the bar in the Okinawa Hilton. The story is narrated by the veteran's son who reveals that his father was a closeted gay man and left his family due to the trauma he sustained during the Vietnam war. For A Romantic Composition, Miyagi conducted field interviews and ethnographic research on gay culture in U.S. bases and nightclubs. Miyagi has noted that the music choice of Bach's Chaconne was significant because the piece, which had been once forgotten and later unearthed, was a metaphorical foil to the bodies of soldiers and Okinawans buried during the war remain undiscovered.

Flower Names (2015) Flower Names is broken into multiple chapters spanning from European mythology to contemporary Okinawa and are connected by the universal theme of cyclical violence and desire. The work begins with the story of Chloris who was raped by Zephyrus, and subsequently features the love triangle between Zephyrus, Apollo and Hyacinthus, which Miyagi has noted was a story that Mozart attempted to make into an opera even though same-sex relationships were forbidden; the romantic relationship between Marcel Proust and composer Reynaldo Hahn; and ends with an American serviceman stationed in Okinawa who talks about the lack of impact the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell had on US bases. Each of the chapters relates back to Chloris, with Reynaldo Hahn being the composer for À Chloris, which is then later lip-synced by the serviceman when performing in drag.

Miyagi has often included various objects and photographs when exhibiting the video work Flower Names including a Hyacinth flower that was being grown within the gallery at MIMOCA in 2015, and a close up of Zephyrus and Chloris from a reproduction of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus shown at the Mori Art Museum.

How Many Nights (2017) Unlike Miyagi's other video works How Many Nights takes on a female narrator and covers the stories of 5 different women spread across different regions and time periods. The main characters include Winnifred Eaton, a 20th-century Chinese Canadian novelist posing under a pseudonym as a Japanese American; Yuki, the protagonist of Eaton's book A Japanese Nightingale; Tokyo Rose, a Japanese propaganda radio broadcaster during WWII; a failed female composer; and an unnamed Japanese women interned at the Manzanar concentration camp. Miyagi was interested in presenting a diaristic narrative of various women whose stories are connected through the act of writing and reading, whether it be novel, letter, script or score. Miyagi's decision to adopt a female voice was an extension of his efforts to test to what degree he can empathize with stories outside of himself and how universal the issues addressed in the series can be.

Writing and publishing activities Miyagi is an avid writer and contributor for numerous magazines and currently has his own book/media review column for Bijutsutecho.

Miyagi has also been involved with the creation and dissemination of art books, including history working at Printed Matter in NYC and UTRECHT in Tokyo, and the Tokyo Art Book Fair. 2014: American Boyfriend: The Bodies of Water. Kyoto City University of the Arts Gallery @KCUA, Kyoto 2017: How Many Nights. Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo 2018: The Dreams That Have Faded. CAI02, Sapporo

Selected group exhibitions

2008: 25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers Exhibition. Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, New York 2009: Intimate Acts. Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, Australia 2010: BigMinis. musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux 2015: Our Beloved World. Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Marugame 2015: Nissan Art Award. BankART Studio NYK, Yokohama 2015: Time of Others. Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, The National Museum of Art Osaka, Singapore Art Museum 2015: VOCA: The Vision of Contemporary Art. The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo 2016: Spider's Thread. Toyota Municipal Museum of Art 2016: Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition. Hong-gah Museum, Taipei 2016: Aichi Triennale 2016: Rainbow Caravan. various locations, Aichi 2016: Time of Others. Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Australia 2016: Roppongi Crossing 2016: My Body, Your Voice. Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 2017: Flap-flop, Clap-clop: A Place Where Words are Born. Arts Maebashi, Maebashi 2017: Mode of Liaisons. Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Bangkok 2017: Almost There. Jorge B. Vargas Museum, Manila 2018: Going Away Closer. Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wilfredo Lam, Havana 2019: Where We Now Stand—In order to Map the Future. 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa 2019: Image Narratives: Literature in Japanese Contemporary Art. The National Art Center, Tokyo 2019: Artists Today. Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum, Naha 2020: Assembridge Nagoya 2020. Nagoya 2020: SAPPORO ART – Good bye SHOWA Building. CAI 02, Sapporo

Selected publications

It's Snowing in My Bedroom. New York: Daniel Reich Gallery, 2007. New Message. Tokyo: Torch Press, 2013. Distant. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2019