Ishiuchi Miyako: Grain and Image
December 9 (Sat.), 2017 - March 4 (Sun.), 2018
December 8, 2017

Ishiuchi Miyako (born in 1947) is currently one of the most highly acclaimed photographersin the world. Her many honors include being the first Asian woman to receive the Hasselblad
Foundation International Award in Photography in 2014.
After studying weaving at Tama Art University, Ishiuchi began taking photographs on herown. She was quickly recognized for her coarse-grained, monochrome pictures of Yokosuka, the citywhere Ishiuchi spent her adolescence, and former red-light districts in various parts of Japan. In recentyears, the artist’s work ひろしま/hiroshima, which deals with clothing used by victims of the atomic
bomb, and a series depicting the personal effects of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo have led to evengreater renown.
Twenty-seventeen is the 40th anniversary of Ishiuchi’s solo exhibition “Yokosuka Story,”
which in effect marked her debut as a photographer. Slated for this landmark year, this exhibition
focuses on “grain,” one of Ishiuchi’s keywords, and consists of approximately 240 items from sixteenseries, from her early years to never-before-shown works.

Through these photographs of abandoned buildings, scars, silk kimono beloved by womenof the Taisho and Showa era who played an important role in the modernization of Japan, and personal
articles that belonged to the artist’s mother and atomic-bomb victims, the exhibition presents Ishiuchi
Miyako’s world, in which she has consistently addressed themes such as existence and absence,people’s memories, and vestiges of time.

■Sections
横浜 Yokohama
In 1975, Ishiuchi Miyako set up a darkroom in her home in Yokohama and began working asa photographer. From then on, nearly all of her black and white photographs, from her debut Yokosuka
Story to Mother’s, were produced in this Yokohama darkroom. The city of Yokohama was itself a subject towhich Ishiuchi repeatedly turned. In her pre-debut Kanazawa Hakkei, Yokohama, she photographed
scenery near her home, but with the sky and clouds exposed for a long time, while the horizon is blackened
with the darkroom technique of dodging, resulting in a granularity that connects to the works that followed.
This section contains, Ishiuchi’s images of the cityscape and buildings of Yokohama, including yokohama
gorakuso and Bayside Courts, as well as works, portraying the body of Butoh dancer Ohno Kazuo, who wasactive in Yokohama.

絹 SilkIshiuchi shot silk garments that had been worn by female atomic bombing victims, and in
2011, she went on to photograph antique Meisen silk fabric in her birthplace, Kiryu in Gunma Prefecture.
Meisen incorporated bold colors and modernist patterns influenced by European avant-garde art, and wereused in kimono for everyday wear, popular among ordinary women who played an enormous role inJapan’s early 20th century modernization. In 2017, Ishiuchi encountered silk in two new forms. One was agroup of kimono that the late father of American fashion designer Rick Owens acquired in Japan. The otherconsisted of costumes for Awa ningyo joruri, a form of puppet theater practiced in Tokushima Prefecturesince before World War II. Ishiuchi who was born in Kiryu, known for the production of silk fabric, and has
been working in Yokohama, which developed along with exports of silk fabric and raw silk, continues tounravel the history surrounding silk through her work.

無垢 Innocence“While a person hopes to remain unblemished through life, we must all sustain and live withwounds, visible and invisible.” The photographs of scars that Ishiuchi continued producing from around1990, were a fundamental re-examination of what it means to live. Among them is a series entitled
Innocence, focusing only on women’s scars and brimming with a sense of empathy for women living withthese vestiges on their bodies. Ishiuchi presents scars as “proof of lives lived.” In Shiranui no Yubi, she
photographed the hands and feet of Ishimure Michiko, a poet and author of the novel Paradise in the Seaof Sorrow. In these works Ishiuchi captures the grain of Ishimure’s skin, on which is inscribed 90 years oflife and powerfully conveys the weight of these years and how, with these hands alone, Ishimure continues
to fight a long and valiant battle.

遺されたもの Belongings
Ishiuchi produced the series Mother’s as a way of facing the reality of her mother’s death, andthese photographs became the first of many depicting the belongings of deceased people, playing asignificant role in determining the direction of her subsequent work. The Frida series conveys, throughpainter Frida Kahlo’s possessions, the day-to-day life of an artist who endured considerable trauma fromillness and accident. This work grew out of a request from a curator at the Frida Kahlo Museum, who had
seen Mother’s, and was shot in 2012 at the “Blue House,” where Frida lived for a long time. ひろしま /hiroshima is a series of photographs of victims’ personal possessions donated to the Hiroshima Peace
Memorial Museum, which Ishiuchi has been working on every year since 2007. In the grain of the objects,
we see one of Ishiuchi’s approaches to observing and photographing the accumulation of time carried to astunning conclusion.

ISHIUCHI MIyako
Born in Kiryu, Gunma Prefecture.
Ishiuchi had a solo exhibition titled Time Textured in Monochrome at The
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 1999. In 2005, she
represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with Mother's 2000-2005:
Traces of the Future, for which she photographed her mother’sbelongings. In 2008, Ishiuchi released the series ひろしま/hiroshima forwhich she took pictures of belongings left behind by victims of the atomicbomb, which were shown in her solo exhibition at Hiroshima City
Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as published as a book. She
photographed kimonos of the type known as Meisen, and in 2012 thisseries, Silken Dreams, was featured in her solo exhibition held at theMarugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art. Ishiuchi
also traveled to Mexico to photograph Frida Kahlo’s belongings kept at theFrida Kahlo Museum. In 2013, her Yokosuka Story was shown at the Tate
Modern in a collection exhibition. In 2014 Ishiuchi had a solo exhibition asher Hasselblad Award show at the Hasselblad Center, and in 2015 sheheld a solo exhibition titled Postwar Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum©Maki Ishii
in Los Angeles, featuring works ranging from her first series “Yokosuka Story” to her latest one ひろしま/hiroshima. In 2016 she held a solo exhibition titled “Frida is” at Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo. Her book ofphotographs Shashin kankei (About Photography) was published by Chikuma Shobo.

■Exhibition Catalog
Title:

Ishiuchi Miyako: Grain and Image

Date of Issue:

December 8, 2017

Published by:

KYURYUDO ART PUBLISHING CO.,LTDSize:

B5 Size

Price:\2,916(tax included)

252 Pages■General Information
Title:

Ishiuchi Miyako: Grain and Image

Dates:

December 9 (Sat.), 2017 - March 4 (Sun.), 2018

Closed:Thursdays (except March 1, 2018), December 28, 2017ー January 4, 2018.

Hours:

10：00～18：00*Open until 16:00 on March 1 (Thu.), 2018
*Open until 20:30 on March 3 (Sat.), 2018
*Admission until 30 minutes before closing.

Admission:

Adults ¥1,500, University and high school students ¥900,Junior high school students ¥400, Free admission for children under 12,Seniors (65 and Older) \1,400*ID required.

Only available at the ticket counter in the museum.

Organizers:

Yokohama Museum of Art [Yokohama Arts Foundation]

Grant fromJapan Arts Fund

Production Grant from

Terumo Foundation for Life Sciences and Arts

Supported by:

NIKON CORPORATION, NIKON IMAGING JAPAN INC., Shiseido Co., Ltd.

In Cooperation withThe Third Gallery Aya, Minatomirai Line, Yokohama Cable Vision Inc.,
Yokohama FM Broadcasting Co., Ltd., Metropolitan Expressway Co., Ltd.,CHOCOLATE DESIGN CO., Ltd.

Co-curators:

OSAKA Eriko（Director, Yokohama Museum of Art）

NUMATA Hideko （Senior Curator, Yokohama Museum of Art）
OSAWA Sayoko （Assistant Curator, Yokohama Museum of Art）
HIBINO Miyon （Assistant Curator, Yokohama Museum of Art）

Press Contact
Ms. Suzuki, Ms. Fujii, Ms. Kaito, Mr. Yamazaki ／Public Relations, Yokohama Museum of Art

3-4-1, Minatomirai, Nishi-ku, Yokohama. 220-0012 JAPANTEL: +81(0)45 221 0319 FAX:+81(0)45 221 0317

E-mail: pr-yma@yaf.or.jp