Miwa Yanagi

is a Japanese photographic artist who examines self-image and stereotypes of women in contemporary Japanese society. Yanagi was discovered by conceptual photographer Yasumasa Morimura, who noticed some of her work while borrowing her house as a set for a separate project.

Biography

Miwa Yanagi was born in 1967 in Kobe, Japan. She completed her postgraduate course work at the Kyoto City University of Arts. Yanagi received two degrees at this university: one in crafts in 1989, then another in art in 1991. She worked mostly with fiber installation art pieces. It was only when she needed to photograph these works for documentation that she realized her skill at photography and decided to pursue this new line of art. One of her first ever photography pieces was titled White Casket(1993) and is now a part of her larger collection: Elevator Girls(1994). She is known mainly as a photographer and video artist. She creates an elaborate, and often costly, staged event using female models ranging in different ages. After the picture or video is taken, the image may be altered with computer graphics. Her artworks examines self-images and stereotypes of Japanese women in contemporary Japanese society.

Yanagi was influenced by a teacher in high school who was passionate for his artwork. She decided to go into art at Kyoto City University of Arts. After graduating from Kyoto City University of Arts, she began working as a teacher where she began to realize that she was not individualized but rather forced to play an ordinary role of a woman teacher. Her big break came when she was nominated to be in an exhibition in Germany in 1996 at the Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. It was here that her works were exhibited along with artists like Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall. The international exposure to a commercial art market gave her major advantage over other Japanese artists. Because of the lack of a contemporary art market in Japan and her success in Germany in 1996 she decided to display her work overseas. Yanagi currently works and lives in Kyoto, Japan.

Artwork

Elevator Girls Yanagi's best known body of works is her first, Elevator Girls. With it, she focuses on themes of everyday life, self-identity, architecture, and employment in the world of girls who operate the elevators of Japanese department stores.

My Grandmothers My Grandmothers was next. The series focuses on how young girls from between 14 and 20 years old perceive and what they thought their life would be like in 50 years. If she liked the answer and felt inspired to work with it the interview was later photographed with models, During the interview process she asks her interviewees questions such as 'What kind of world do you want to see in 50 years? And how do you imagine yourself living in it?' This series is the complete opposite of Elevator Girls, where the models are shown as pretty, have little emotion and are similar.

Video In the video Suna Onna (i.e. "sand woman", 2005) Yanagi shows the relationship between a child and her grandmother. The grandmother tells the granddaughter of her meeting with a sand woman as a child. It is meant to be a tale of transformation and the supernatural world.

Performances Although known more for photography and video, Yanagi also did performance pieces before she switched to photography. The main subject was what she was going through as a young woman in Japan. Elevator Girls was originally a performance piece. Yanagi also did another performance piece in which she hired someone who was to show contemporary art in a museum to visitors as a real guide would. Yanagi gave them a script on what to say and at what points during the tour that they were supposed to perform certain gestures. The guide was totally believable in this performance, wearing the same uniform as regular tour guides and speaking in the same manner. People seemed more interested in the tour guide than the actual art work. Some people even left the museum after the guide finished speaking. In Yanagi's view the performance is about the feeling of pleasure and the experience. It was more about the performance by the guide than actual artwork in the museum. Yanagi's current subjects are the lives of women and how they are perceived in the modern world. Here she looks on how women are treated and viewed by society and also how women culturally view themselves.

Exhibitions In 1993 Yanagi held her first solo exhibition, and since 1996 her work has been exhibited in both solo and group shows throughout Europe and the United States.

Her solo shows include: her first show in 1993, in an exhibition in Art Space Niji, Kyoto Deutsche Guggenheim, 2004 Miwa Yanagi. Sammlung Deutsche Bank, Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen (Bremen) Ohara Museum of Art, 2005 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2008 Arts Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture, Japan, April 19–June 23, 2019

Her group exhibitions include: "Art Now '94" Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Hyogo 1994 "Future recollections" Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Kyoto, "Freeze" Espaço Cultural Sérgio Porto, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2000 "Complicity, Biennale de Lyon 2001 Prelude to 2003" Lyon France 2001 "Still Motion: Liquid painting" Mie Prefectural Art Museum (National Museum of Art, Osaka, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography) "Tsubaki Kai Ten" Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo (all 2008)

Collections Deutsche Bank

Awards

1998 First Prize: Leopold Godowsky Jr. Color Photography Award (Photographic Resource Center at Boston University) 1999 VOCA Prize, The Vision of Contemporary Art '99 (the Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo) Kyoto City Artist Prize Higashikawa Prize - New Photographer Prize (Higashikawa, Hokkaido) 2000 Sakuya-Konohana Prize (Osaka City) 2001 Kyoto Prefectural Artist Prize 2004 Hyogo Prefectural Artist Prize 2006 Takashimaya Art Prize