Previous Showcases
When Darkness and Light Call to Each Other
闇と光が呼びあうとき
Solo exhibition
2016. Gallery H2O, Kyoto, Japan
When Darkness and Light Call to Each Other was composed of two facing spaces: a world of light and life force in the main gallery, and a quiet, dreamlike darkness in the tea room across from it.
Light
Lost in Light (光にまよう), 2016 (detail)
Mineral and suihi pigments on washi-covered wooden panel, 90 × 270 cm
The gallery centered on the show's largest work, Lost in Light (90 × 270 cm), within the painting series The Breath. For this series, forms were extracted from plant images and rendered on washi in traditional Japanese materials, drawn to the fathomless life force and steady cycle of plants — fragile in fragments, yet endlessly renewing. In Lost in Light, Miki followed lines and planes that emerged beyond her own intention within the plant imagery, seeking the pleasurable illusion of losing one's way in the picture and sharing it with the viewer. The motif is the mukuge (rose of Sharon), a flower tied to Kyoto's Gion Festival, held in July like the exhibition; the work also draws on the decorative composition of Edo-period Rinpa painting. With birdsong and flowing water recorded in the Kyoto mountains, this space expressed the "breath of life," carrying the traces of the artist's hand.
The Breath series, 2016 Mineral and suihi pigments on washi-covered wooden panel 14 works, dimensions variable
Dark
Blooming in Darkness (闇に咲く), 2016
Giclée and silkscreen on washi, mounted on a two-panel wooden furosaki byōbu (folding tea-ceremony screen),
69.7 × 92.4 cm each Projected CGI animation onto the screen and surrounding space, 6 min 15 sec (loop)
Concept: Miki | CGI: Akinori Ueno
Facing it, the tea room expressed higan — a world apart from the one in which we live. Lost in Light was photographed and its image reversed, then printed by giclée and silkscreen onto a furosaki byōbu (a tea-ceremony screen) titled Blooming in Darkness. A moon moves across its water; a single firefly emerges from the screen, flies out beyond it toward a projected starry sky, and finally becomes a shooting star. The firefly represents the fragility of life, the moon and stars its infinite cycle. Quiet and dreamlike, this space answered the light across from it, expressing the connection between light and dark, life and death.
Artist｜mikibeautree | visual art｜Kyoto
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