ART LIVES TORIDE Where Art Is Born

I am from Toyama, Japan. I spent three years painting at Tatsumigaoka Art High School in Kanazawa, and then entered Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, where I began to create three-dimensional works. Yoshitomo Nara had just returned from Germany, and I joined as an assistant for his exhibition. Just after graduation I entered Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. I lived in Düsseldorf for about 16 years, and I am still affiliated with a gallery in Germany.

When I first moved to Germany, I was making works that expressed my emotions. However, among people from various countries, I was not understood at all. So I began to think about what the common theme was for all mankind, and began to create works on the theme of life and death.

First I made a baby carriage, and then I made a hearse. In the hearse, the audience is shown images of what they will see after they die, and they have a near-death experience for about 10 minutes. At that time, I received various reactions, such as, “This is what a hearse looks like in my country,” or “Mihoko sees death that way. That was interesting.

When I temporarily returned to Japan, I went to a public bathhouse with my mother. I saw naked grandmothers at that time, and it was so novel to see them. How Kunst (German for “art”)! I thought. I would go to the bathhouse every night, secretly observe them, and then go home and sketch them. I often see how the body has been deformed over the years, like the way the knees bend. I think the way they are deformed is artistic. This was the beginning of the Milky Way series that I have been creating for the past 10 years.

Milky Way -Threshold 012/017/FRP, LED, Dimmer, Wood/168 x 70 x 70 cm

Human beings grow old and become senile. I believe that this is the same as the movement of the universe. I made a lot of holes in the shape of an old body so that light would be projected from inside. Holes are grains of emotion. The older we get, the more we are overflowing with emotion, isn’t it? This is an expression of the idea that this is what creates the universe. Through my work, I have come to feel the idea that human life and other living things are born from the universe and return to it after death. In my life, I have learned a lot from my work by working with my hands.

There was never a situation where I was stuck for an idea, it always seemed to come from somewhere. I am now beginning to create a new series of works that I call the UZU series. When I look at works created by people in the past, I often find that the vortex is the essence of the motif. When I wondered why, I began to think that people in the past must have known that the vortex was space. It is still a work in progress, and when completed, it will be about 2 meters in diameter. Perhaps it is because I have been making three-dimensional objects for so long that I have an idea of the approximate size of the vortex even before it is completed, or perhaps it just seems to come to me.

Toride has a lot of nice elderly people and I get to meet a lot of cool models. I have a series of works that are modeled after real hands, and I use the hands of my neighborhood grandfathers and grandmothers for this series. After 10 years, the grandmothers I am acquainted with are getting older and older. I incorporate the passage of time into my work.

I moved to Toride when I returned from Germany. My husband is a graduate of Tokyo University of the Arts, and we had friends there. The air in Toride is very good and the people are very nice. The grandparents in the neighborhood were very kind to me, giving me daikon radishes and Chinese cabbage, and coming all the way to Tokyo to see my exhibition when I held it. When I was hospitalized for a subarachnoid hemorrhage and when my husband died of illness, the neighborhood grandmothers came to visit me many times. Even when I was depressed, they brought me food. They took very good care of me.

When I told them I am getting remarried soon, the grandmother next door gave me a bouquet of flowers. They are all really nice people, and I love Togashira. I would like to have a large studio, but if I were to look for one, it would definitely be in Togashira. I also like my current house with a garden. I do the shaping work in the garden, and when it’s finished, I bring it inside. If it rains, I paint inside. I think it’s nice to be able to work in that rhythm.