Mika Ninagawa, Yuka Kashihara, Midori Sato / Group Exhibition
January 1 – April 17, 2016
Ohara Museum of Art, Okayama
Group Exhibition, Ohara Museum of Art, Okayama
Artist Profile
Mika Ninagawa
Photographer, Director
Mika Ninagawa has been awarded numerous photography awards, such as Kimura Ihei Award. She has directed a number of video works including the films “Sakuran” (2007), “Helter Skelter” (2012), “Diner”(2019) and “No Longer Human”(2019). Currently her original drama for Netflix, “Followers” is released in 190 countries worldwide. In 2008, her solo exhibition “Mika Ninagawa: Earthly Flowers, Heavenly Colors” toured several museums throughout Japan, attracting a total of 180,000 visitors. In 2010, Ninagawa published a monograph by Rizzoli N.Y. In 2012, Ninagawa won the Silver Prize at the Shindo Kaneto Awards with “Helter Skelter”. She held extensive solo exhibitions mainly in Asian cities such as Taipei and Shanghai where they gathered the greatest number of visitors in their history. Her solo exhibition “Into Fiction/Reality Mika Ninagawa” started its tour from Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto in 2018 and will travel until 2021 throughout museums in Japan.
For more information on the artist, please see the following URL.
https://mikaninagawa.com
Yuka Kashihara
Yuka Kashihara uses oil paint applied in a thinly diffuse manner similar to that of Japanese nihonga painting, and by applying it in numerous layers she is able to create a unique depth of color. Within the world of her artworks, scenes from both reality and the spaces of the internal imagination are gently interwoven. Against this backdrop, having left Japan and moved to Germany where she continued developing her practice, Kashihara acquired an interest in the ‘distance’ between the internal and the external. This included the physical distance between Japan and Germany; and further, the distance herself as a Japanese person and herself while in Germany. This becomes expressed symbolically as an introspective speculation in the forms of the motifs of caves, holes, mountains and lakes which she repeatedly takes up within her work, and through this process of sublimation it is as though the original energies which lie dormant within the great Earth have become awakened.
Yuka Kashihara was born in 1980 in Hiroshima Prefecture. In 2006 she graduated from the Japanese Painting Department of Musashino Art University. In the same year she moved to Germany, and in 2013 she acquired a Diploma from the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. In 2015, she was named a Meisterschüler (Masters graduate) of the same academy, studying under Professor Annette Schröter. In 2008 she exhibited at the Bauhuas Dessau Foundation in Shakkei (“borrowed scenery”), a solo show curated by research scholar Torsten Blume of the same Foundation, and in 2012 she exhibited in VOCA, Tokyo, where she received both the Honourable Mention Award and the Ohara Museum of Art Award.
1980 Born in Hiroshima, Japan
2006 B.F.A in Japanese Painting, Musashino Art University, Tokyo
2012 Stayed in Germany under POLA Art Foundation Grants Program
2013 Completed Diploma in Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, Germany
A part-time lecturer of Musashino Art University, Department of Japanese Painting, Tokyo (-2017)
2015 Completed Meisterschüler in Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, Germany (under Prof. Annette Schroeter)
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Lives and works in Germany
Midori Sato
Midori Sato was born in 1984 in Aichi Prefecture. She graduated from Oil Painting Course, School of Art, Nagoya University of Arts in 2008, and studied at Ecole nationale des beaux arts de Dijion, France as an exchange student. She received M.F.A from Graduate School of Tokyo Zokei University in 2010. She studied in Paris as a recipient of the POLA Art Foundation award for overseas research in 2017.
A closet packed full of colorful dresses, an array of high-heeled shoes on shelves, vividly colored flowers: Midori Sato shows us things that every woman yearns to see. Yet if we turn our attention to the details of her work, bold brushstrokes and an intentionally uneven paint coating tinge her subject matter with the contours of abstraction. This abstraction demonstrates the force of the power that draws the viewer into the picture plane.
Her major solo exhibitions include “Diaphanous petals” (The Pola Art Museum, Atrium Gallery, Kanagawa, 2019), “Bouquet” (8/ ART GALLERY/ Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, 2019), “Orange Glow” (Green Art Flowers Gallery, Paris, France, 2018) and “Reflections” (Roppongi Hills A/D Gallery, Tokyo, 2017). She participated in group exhibitions such as “Aichi Triennale 2016 rainbow caravan” (Aichi, 2016) and “Embracing for Painting” (Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, 2015). In 2013, she received the Ohara Museum of Art Prize at “VOCA 2013″(The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo) and the artwork was housed in the Museum.