Tomio Koyama Gallery is delighted to announce the Mika Ninagawa exhibition “Eternity in a Moment,” held in conjunction with the artist’s exhibition at Toranomon Hills’ TOKYO NODE Gallery A/B/C.
The TOKYO NODE exhibition—Ninagawa’s largest to date—was jointly undertaken by the members of EiM,* a creative team composed of specialists in different fields. The show centers on immersive video installations that offer visitors a multi-sensory experience. The exhibition at Tomio Koyama Gallery, meanwhile, presents photographs and three-dimensional pieces that embody Ninagawa’s new artistic perspective on the world. Visitors are invited to engage with and experience the distant worlds that each individual image depicts.
【Toward a new era: the universal within the ephemeral, and the fleeting beauty of nature that connects us to the future, expressed in a million colors】
Mika Ninagawa’s output to date, both as a photography and a film director, has been marked by a high-contrast, “hyper-saturated” color palette, as seen in her photo book Everlasting Flowers and her traveling exhibition “Into Fiction/Reality” (Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, Beijing Times Art Museum, and other locations; 2018–2022).
The recent pandemic, however, prompted Ninagawa to engage with the world around her with a more ingenuous frame of mind, leading to a renewed appreciation of its beauty. Thus emerged a new aesthetic with a more “luminous” palette that bathed her subjects in light. Her creative process too underwent a major shift, from being an individual effort to a group effort—from an “I” to a “We.” The result was her photographs that captured dreamlike moments of reality and her dynamic video installations. This creative departure was showcased in her 2022 exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, “Mika Ninagawa: A Garden of Flickering Lights,” drawing widespread interest.
These latest exhibitions at TOKYO NODE and Tomio Koyama Gallery present a further development: works that attempt to extract every possible variety of color from our everyday world, employing up to a million, said to be the maximum discernible by the human eye.
The upcoming exhibition begins with monochrome pieces that portray a world bereft of all color, then—as if to echo the pandemic-era standstill and eventual revival—moves on to photographs capturing the energy and hues that fill our everyday world. The images show day-to-day scenes, seasonal changes, and the beauty and power of natural life in all its transience, richness, and diversity. Flowers wither and fall to the ground, seeds scatter; lives end and begin anew. These images will connect with the viewers’ own experiences and emotions, forming universal mental images that inspire thoughts about the eternal, and about the future.
The photographs in this exhibition have all been taken in ordinary, unassuming locations within the continuum of everyday life. They show us that, with just a slight change of perspective, we can discover a whole new beauty and poignancy even in mundane sights we take for granted.
Also among the exhibits is a new three-dimensional work, a standalone version of her installation piece After Glow of lives that garnered attention at her solo exhibition this year at Tomio Koyama Gallery Maebashi.
Mami Kataoka, the director of Mori Art Museum, said the following about Ninagawa’s art on the occasion of the TOKYO NODE exhibition:
“Mika Ninagawa’s flowers always radiate so intensely. What is it that drives her on to such reaches? And what darkness did she journey through to reach such a blindingly vibrant world? Perhaps Ninagawa’s works shine because they acknowledge all of it—the day-to-day struggles we all face, the pandemic, war—and nevertheless remain determined to live the ‘here and now.’ This exhibition will likely reveal to us what lies at the root of these turbulent emotions.”
Joining forces with a talented team of creators, Ninagawa is venturing into new and dynamic modes of expression, which distill her artistic practice to date while looking toward the future that lies ahead. This exhibition offers viewers a chance to become more attuned to the universal beauty amid the passage of daily life, and to gain a fresh sense of the connection between ourselves and the world. We cordially invite you to join us in this experience.
*EiM: Eternity in a Moment
Founded by photographer and film director Mika Ninagawa, data scientist Hiroaki Miyata, and set designer Enzo, the creative team EiM puts together a diverse selection of members for each project they undertake. For the TOKYO NODE exhibition, EiM invited guest creatives such as architect Sou Fujimoto, working together to craft the multi-sensory experience of “Eternity in a Moment.”
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For press inquiries, please contact: press@tomiokoyamagallery.com
(Makiko Okado)
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