Miwa Yanagi
dal 9/2/2008 al 3/5/2008
Segnalato da
9/2/2008
Miwa Yanagi
Museum of Fine Arts MFAH, Houston
Deutsche Bank Collection. The artist has fabricated three distinct series that confront and disrupt traditional perceptions of women. Elevator Girls - inspired by the young women who work in Japanese department stores -, My Granmothers - where she asked young women to imagine their lives 50 years in the future -, and Fairy Tales - where focusing on stories in which the central characters are either young or old, then she reinvents the story by confusing the distinctions.
Contemporary Photographer Miwa Yanagi Explores the Place of Women in Japanese Culture in Large-Scale, Theatrical Photographs
Artist's First U.S. Museum Solo Exhibition to Travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, February 10 — May 4, 2008
Miwa Yanagi: Deutsche Bank Collection Presents Three Series, Videos
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is the second venue for Miwa Yanagi: Deutsche Bank Collection, the Japanese photographer Miwa Yanagi's first solo museum show in the United States. Comprising more than 30 large-scale photographs and video work from the Deutsche Bank Collection, the exhibition is on view from February 10 through May 4, 2008 in the large, dramatic space of Cullinan Hall in the Caroline Wiess Law Building, 1001 Bissonnet Street. The exhibition overlaps with Houston's FotoFest, the city-wide biennial that brings hundreds of writers, art critics, and photographers to Houston.
Since Miwa Yanagi's first solo exhibition in Japan in 1993, her work has appeared in exhibitions worldwide. Peter C. Marzio, director, said, "The MFAH is pleased to once again present the powerful work of Miwa Yanagi, whom audiences first encountered in Houston in 2003 during the landmark History of Japanese Photography, which was organized by the museum under the guidance of Anne Wilkes Tucker. The museum is grateful to Deutsche Bank for sharing this exhibition."
"In her relatively short career, Yanagi has already claimed recognition on the international photography scene and has created three distinctive series," said Tucker, the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the MFAH. "Each of the series she has produced—Elevator Girls, My Grandmothers, and Fairy Tale—grapples with feminist issues. Her photographs comment on societal expectations, stereotyping, and role-playing, and in their complexity challenge the viewer to uncover the layers of meaning."
Miwa Yanagi: Deutsche Bank Collection
The photographs of Miwa Yanagi explore the role of women in the context of Japanese society, yet reflect the archetypal concerns of women across cultures. Mixing both the imaginary and the real, Yanagi conjures compelling visions in her large-format compositions using theatrical set-ups and mesmerizing color. The MFAH installation comprises three series—Elevator Girls, begun in 1993, My Grandmothers, started in 1999, and Fairy Tale, dating from 2004—as well as two videos, Kagome Kagome, from 1994, and Girls in Her Sand, 2004. The exhibition premiered at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York last spring.
The Elevator Girls series was inspired by Japan's dutiful elevator greeters: beautiful, slender, young girls in uniforms and white gloves who welcome visitors into hotel and department store elevators. The photographs, many of them large-format, feature groups of identically dressed female models posed in the sterile, deserted environment of modern-day shopping malls. The series evokes questions about Japan's stereotypical elevator girls and the standardization of women in societal roles. Yanagi has stated that the series is about "myself and other Japanese women" in today's society.
Yanagi created the ongoing Grandmother series as a response to the youthful subjects of Elevator Girls. In this series, Yanagi has collaborated with young models to project their dreams of themselves 50 years into the future. After interviewing her models, Yanagi uses costumes, wigs, and makeup in digitally altered images to portray their personal visions of life in old age. Related texts accompany the colorful images, which depict a startling array of independent, triumphant, attractive women.
In Fairy Tale, Yanagi reinvents well-known Western fairy tales such as Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding Hood to explore the underlying meaning of the tales. All of the characters in the photos are either young or old, but all are played by young girls, and the only indication of age is through the wigs and makeup the young girls wear. Shot in black-and-white, the photos are troubling and complex.
Both of Yanagi's video works to date will be presented: Kagome Kagome, 1998, and Girls in Her Sand, 2004. Girls was inspired by Kobo Abe's 1962 novel Woman of the Dunes and the subsequent 1964 film by the Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara. In the book and film, the protagonists cannot leave their home, which is continually engulfed by sand dunes. Yanagi sets the video just beyond the entrance of a tent, toward the dunes beyond. In the exhibition, the video is shown within the confines of a tent suspended from the ceiling, so the viewer watches a video of the dunes "outside." The 1964 film will screen at the MFAH in mid-April. Kagome Kagome draws on Yanagi's early career as a performance artist. The works' title associates the aimless wandering of the young women in and out of long corridors in the DVD with a Japanese children's guessing game involving membership in, and, alternatively, exclusion from a group.
Deutsche Bank Art and Artist of the Business Year
In 1979, Deutsche Bank became one of the first companies to link contemporary art with the working world. Since that time, Deutsche Bank has set a benchmark for corporate commitment to the arts. Today, the Deutsche Bank Collection is the largest corporate collection worldwide and includes over 50,000 works shown in bank offices on all five continents. "Art in the Workplace" was conceived for cultural enrichment and not investment. The collection, which mainly concentrates on works on paper, mirrors the art of a century, ranging from post-war to the present day.
Each year since 1980, Deutsche Bank has chosen to feature an "Artist of the
Business Year" from its collection, accompanied by a solo exhibition that travels to
museums and kunsthalles internationally. "Miwa Yanagi: Deutsche Bank Collection" marks the first year the Artist of the Business Year program has expanded to the United States.
Organization and Funding
Organized by Deutsche Bank Art, the exhibition of more than 30 works is overseen in Houston by Tucker, who is one of the catalogue's essayists. Deutsche Bank is the lead sponsor of the exhibition. Additional generous funding is provided by Carey C. Shuart and Humanities Texas, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Catalogue
An English-language catalogue of the exhibition with color plates and texts by Ariane Grigoteit, Friedhelm Huette, Manon Slome, Peter Herbstreuth, Dominique Gonzalez-Forster, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Chizuko Ueno, and Tucker is available at the MFAH Shop, 713-639-7360, for $34.
Related Programs
An array of programs, including a lecture about the artist for museum members by Tucker is planned. In addition, the museum offers school tours and resources for educators from the museum's Kinder Foundation Teacher Resource Center.
MFAH Collections
Founded in 1900, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is the largest art museum in America south of Chicago, west of Washington, D.C., and east of Los Angeles. The encyclopedic collection of the MFAH numbers more than 56,000 works and embraces the art of antiquity to the present. Featured are the finest artistic examples of the major civilizations of Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Africa. Italian Renaissance paintings, French Impressionist works, photographs, American and European decorative arts, African and Pre-Columbian gold, American art, and European and American paintings and sculpture from post-1945 are particularly strong holdings. Recent additions to the collections include Rembrandt van Rijn's Portrait of a Young Woman (1633), the Heiting Collection of Photography, a major suite of Gerhard Richter paintings, an array of important works by Jasper Johns, a rare, second-century Hellenistic bronze Head of Poseidon/Antigonos Doson, major canvases by 19th-century painters Gustave Courbet and J.M.W. Turner, distinguished work by the leading 20th and 21st century Latin American artists, and The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art.
Media Contacts:
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Frances Carter Stephens, Lynn Feuerbach, Dana Mattice, Megan Whitenton 713-639-7540 or MFAHPR@mfah.org
Deutsche Bank, New York
Renee Calabro 212-250-5525 or renee.calabro@db.com
Museum of Fine Arts
1001 Bissonnet Street - Houston
Hours and Admission
The Audrey Jones Beck Building is at 5601 Main Street and the Caroline Wiess Law Building is at 1001 Bissonnet Street. Hours are Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 a.m.—5 p.m.; Thursday 10 a.m.—9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m.—7 p.m.; and Sunday, 12:15—7 p.m. The museum is closed on Monday, except for holidays. Admission to this exhibition is included with general admission to the museum. General admission is $7 for adults and $3.50 for children 6-18, students, and senior adults (65+); admission is free for children 5 and under. Admission is free on Thursday, courtesy of Shell Oil Company Foundation. Admission is free on Saturday and Sunday for children 18 and under with a Houston Public Library Power Card or any other library card.