Why does she choose to take pictures of artificial flowers rather than real ones? For example, some of her works feature photographs of artificial flowers. Ninagawa’s photographic works are often a mixture of the fictional and the real. But when I was young, I was cursed by the idea that I mustn’t enrich my lifestyle or be satisfied or happy,” she said with a laugh. Now I think it’s fine just to enjoy my life without digging my heels in about it. That’s the difficulty of producing expressive work for the public, and I have a kind of love-hate relationship with it. However, audiences sometimes reject my work before even actually seeing it. I want to be an artist who creates work with breadth, that anyone can access, rather than producing pieces for a limited range of people, such as a handful of art lovers or the wealthy. “I was furious about the inequality between men and women, about the idea that you couldn’t do certain things or had to put up with being told certain things because you were a woman. At the root of this anger was the atmosphere in Japan at the time. Outrage was the motivating force behind what she expressed, Ninagawa said. Talking about this memory, she revealed her highly sensitive side as an artist. When I won a major prize, even though my exhibition attracted the highest-ever number of visitors, I was dogged nonetheless by hurtful comments about my shots being out of focus and that they didn’t even deserve to be called photographs.” “In the world of photography in the mid-1990s, when I started out, shots so out of focus that you couldn’t tell what was depicted were anathema. I felt as though I’d been liberated from something at last.”įor Ninagawa, being a photographer was perhaps not simply an occupation, but the best means of expressing what was inside her, so she could become herself. “I well remember the momentary excitement I felt as a first-year undergraduate, studying graphic design at an art university, the first time one of my photographs was chosen for inclusion in an exhibition open to submissions from the public and I was called an artist. “Since I was very young, I’ve wanted to find the answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ I think one influence was growing up in an unconventional family environment, with a director for a father and an actress for a mother,” she said. How did she start taking the photographs that established the name of Mika Ninagawa, and what direction does she now intend to take in her expressive work? We talked to her at her Tokyo studio. While outrage long was the motivating force behind her creativity, a dramatic change has taken place in her inner landscape over the last few years, she says. The daughter of eminent stage and film director Yukio Ninagawa, she has been driven since early childhood by a desire bordering on obsession to prove herself as a person in her own right, not merely Yukio Ninagawa’s daughter. She consistently captures intense yet ephemeral moments of life, like sparks of vivid color. Mika Ninagawa has won the acclaim of a wide-ranging audience as one of contemporary Japan’s leading photographers and film directors. ĭirector Mika Ninagawa on set while shooting the film “Diner” (2019). Ninagawa has made five feature films, including “Helter Skelter” (2012) and “Diner” (2019), and also directed the Netflix original series “Followers.” Her most recent photo book is “Mika Ninagawa: A Garden of Flickering Lights.” Her major solo exhibitions encompass “Mika Ninagawa” at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Taipei (2016), the traveling exhibition “Mika Ninagawa: Into Fiction/Reality,” which visited a number of Japanese art museums (2018-2021), “Mika Ninagawa: Into Fiction/Reality” at the Beijing Times Art Museum (2022) and “Mika Ninagawa: A Garden of Flickering Lights” at the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum (2022). In 2010, Rizzoli New York published a book of her photographs. Among the many awards she has won is the Kimura Ihei Award. Focusing primarily on photography, Ninagawa has created many films, videos and spatial installations.
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