Michiko Kon: Photographs
In her first museum exhibition in the United States, Japanese photographer Michiko Kon shows 30 large black and white prints at the List Visual Arts Center.
Kon’s photographs are strange, elegant, and slightly surreal still lifes. The photographic approach is deadpan documentary. This mischief resides in the arrangements themselves, which commingle dumb and inorganic objects of everyday life – hats, chairs, and undergarments – with equally familiar but organic materials ranging from flowers to vegetables to raw fish. The implication of inevitable decay makes these photographs into stark and powerful contemporary mementos mori.
The print quality of these dark and dramatic tableaux is exquisite and seductive, balancing luscious blacks with a variety of sheens and textures. The prints mimic the fastidious presentation techniques of food and fashion photography, which are carefully calculated to incite desire in the viewer. Yet the allure of these objects is undercut by the materials of their construction; imagine the cool clamminess of a fish-flesh fedora or the slippery flagellation of lingerie whose lace is composed of small herrings and safety
Michiko Kon
Posted by Fabio 6 August
Michiko Kon is a renowned Japanese photographer. She took up photography after initially learning woodblock printing. Her still-lifes featuring fish skins, salmon roe, cabbage-stuffed stockings, often in the form of clothes, have been well received both in Japan and abroad. Her photographs are constructed, sharp, with deep blacks and bright whites, and quite humorous. Her early work appeared in the monograph Eat, and in a second monograph, Michiko Kon, Still Lifes, in
Boot of shrimps
There are sea and mountains in the town where I have
been living since my birth. We can get fresh fish and
vegetables there. When I look at them or make food
from them, more than having an awareness that they
are foodstuffs, I feel the delicacy and beauty of their
forms, the eroticism of raw things, as well as their
transience.
– Michiko Kon
Michiko Kon’s idiosyncratic images combine the familiar shapes of everyday objects with the textures of raw seafood. The surreal images take us into a realm of fantasy, where luxury items such as a boot, a handbag or a piece of lingerie turns into the peculiar. Her photographs have been interpreted as a comment on the excess consumerism in Japan during late s and early s, yet they also reflect on life and death and the transient beauty of things. Recently, Kon has expressed feelings of atonement for
the enormous quantities of seafood being taken from the oceans. By creating the photographs, she wants to memorialise these creatures and bring them back to life.
, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan.
Michiko Kon creates assemblages with a minimalist background, and where biological elements such as sea creatures, plants and insects are in tension between an animate and inanimate reality. Her work is a parade of living creatures turned into inanimate objects, and inanimate objects turned into living creatures. Kon creates surreal still life scenographies, with seductively mundane objects, such as raw sea elements, vegetables and textile in order to get images of impossible pieces.
Kon uses photography as her means of expression because it fixes this process of transformation. In many of her photographs there are numerous elements which were once “alive”. These things are not in fact actually alive, but they are not complete corpses (inanimate matter), either they hang in mid-air in the ambiguous region between life and death. While in the process of dying, they still had the fresh warmth of life: is there truly a differentiation between life and death?. Perhaps our feeling that we must divide these two regions is nothing but a way of making it easier to l
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