Izumi Miyazaki

Born

1994, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan

Education

Imaging Arts, Musashino Art University, Tokyo (graduated 2016)

Medium

Photographic self-portraiture, digitally staged

Record at the gallery

WPG.07 Cute and Cruel – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (30 Jun – 30 Jul 2016)

Izumi Miyazaki is the most widely covered artist in this archive. Born in 1994 in Yamanashi Prefecture and trained in Imaging Arts at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, she began posting self-portraits to Tumblr in 2012, while still a student, and found an international audience before she had a gallery, a book, or a diploma. The pictures that carried her there are instantly identifiable: a young woman with a black bob and an expressionless face, photographed in ordinary Japanese interiors and suburban settings, subjected to cheerful catastrophe — her head sliced like bread, a salmon fillet standing in for her hair, tomatoes, rice balls, knives and ketchup deployed with the flat matter-of-factness of a product photograph. The work reads kawaii at first glance and cruel at the second, and it does so on purpose.

The deadpan is the method. Miyazaki appears in nearly every frame she makes, always without visible emotion, and the refusal to perform feeling is what lets the staged violence stay comic rather than gothic. Critics placed the work in several lineages at once — the photographic self-portrait tradition, surrealism (she has cited René Magritte, along with the film directors Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch), and the vernacular of the selfie generation, which the pictures parody by exaggeration. The publisher of her monograph described the attention to the self as satire of a selfie-obsessed generation and, simultaneously, an extension of a time-honored genre. Both descriptions fit; the essay in this file, The girl who photographs her own disappearance, argues the case from the pictures themselves.

The individual pictures have the titles of grocery lists — Pan (2013), Hair Cut (2016), Rice Ball Mountain (2016), Broccoli (2017), Energy (2017), Open the Eye (2018) — and the economy of jokes. Food recurs constantly, as prop, double and threat: the artist's head served on a plate, mirrored by a tomato; her expression matched to a raw salmon; sardines standing in for eyebrows; a high kick performed on top of an oversized onigiri. So does doubling — she appears twice or many times in a single frame, split, multiplied, or attending her own beheading with perfect composure. The technique is precise studio lighting and unshowy Photoshop, deployed until the impossible reads as ordinary; the effect depends on nothing looking effortful.

Attention came in waves. TIME ran a piece on the Tumblr account on 5 January 2015, while she was still a student; the English-language photography press followed in the summer of 2016 — It's Nice That and Booooooom in June, CNN Style in August — and the features have continued at intervals since, through a VICE Photo Issue appearance in 2019. In 2017 her work was included among forty photographers in the survey volume Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze.

Her exhibition history began in Luxembourg. Cute and Cruel – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (30 Jun – 30 Jul 2016), record WPG.07 in this catalogue, was her first solo exhibition, mounted the summer she graduated; the full account is at the exhibition history. Her first solo exhibition in Japan, Stand-In – Art-U room, Tokyo (2016), followed: an installation built around the reconstruction of a photo studio and the figure of the stand-in, the person who substitutes for an actor while lighting is tested. That winter she was one of fourteen artists in Give Me Yesterday – Osservatorio, Fondazione Prada, Milan (21 Dec 2016 – 12 Mar 2017), the exhibition that inaugurated the foundation's photography space in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.

The largest presentations came in 2018 and 2019. At KYOTOGRAPHIE 2018 her series UP to ME (2015–18) filled a building in Kyoto's Gion district — her biggest show to date, with images also wrapped around a BMW i3 that shuttled between festival venues — and the same spring Seigensha in Kyoto published Me and Me (13 Apr 2018), her first monograph, bilingual in Japanese and English and distributed internationally through shashasha. In 2019 MOMENTA Biennale de l'image in Montreal, under the theme The Life of Things, posted fifteen of her images in public space through the Mile End district. After that wave the public record thins considerably; what it shows and does not show is kept, dated and open, in Where is Izumi Miyazaki? The record since 2018.

The Miyazaki file

• WPG.07 Cute & Cruel: the exhibition history
• Essay The girl who photographs her own disappearance
• Where are they now Where is Izumi Miyazaki? The record since 2018

Press and exhibition chronology

• 2012 — Opens a Tumblr account and begins posting self-portraits as a student.
• 2015 — Early international coverage, including TIME (5 Jan 2015) and IGNANT (18 Feb 2015).
• Jun 2016 — It's Nice That (22 Jun) and Booooooom (28 Jun) feature the self-portraits.
• 30 Jun – 30 Jul 2016 — Cute and Cruel – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg: first solo exhibition (WPG.07).
• Aug 2016 — CNN Style interview-profile.
• 3 – 18 Dec 2016 — Stand-In – Art-U room, Tokyo: first solo exhibition in Japan.
• 21 Dec 2016 – 12 Mar 2017 — Give Me Yesterday – Osservatorio, Fondazione Prada, Milan (group).
• 2017 — Included in Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze; Feature Shoot profile (Jul 2017).
• 13 Apr 2018 — Me and Me, first monograph, published by Seigensha, Kyoto.
• Spring 2018 — UP to ME – KYOTOGRAPHIE International Photography Festival, Kyoto (ASPHODEL, Gion).
• 22 Jun 2018 — IMA Online interview (Japanese).
• 16 Sep 2018 — Numéro TOKYO interview (Japanese).
• 5 Sep – 13 Oct 2019 — MOMENTA Biennale de l'image, Montreal: fifteen images in public space, Mile End.
• 2019 — VICE Photo Issue publishes her work on identity stereotypes.

In her own words: an annotated interview index

Miyazaki has given few long interviews; most of what is reliably known about her intentions comes from the handful below. Each entry notes what the interview actually establishes.

Aug 2016 — CNN Style

The widest-read English interview of the 2016 wave. Establishes the origin story — an only child, given her mother's silver Pentax as a teenager, a high-school photography club — and her stated aim of sharing a feeling of mortality in comic form. She resisted the idea of a signature: "I don't really feel that I have a style." On the recurring figure in the pictures she described "a double me," tying the self-portraiture to childhood loneliness.

Jul 2017 — Feature Shoot

"The Funny, Scary World of One Young Photographer," published the year after her graduation. Establishes the working method of the period: lighting and Photoshop harnessed for a deliberately cinematic effect, humor and menace balanced by composition. Useful as the baseline of her English-language press between the Luxembourg show and the Kyoto festival.

22 Jun 2018 — IMA Online

Substantial Japanese-language interview, published as her KYOTOGRAPHIE presentation ran; the headline frames her work as millennial-generation photographic expression and irony. Establishes, in her own account, the scale of the Tumblr reception and a practical point of biography: she chose photography over filmmaking because film demands collective production and photography let her work alone.

16 Sep 2018 — Numéro TOKYO

Interview titled, in translation, "This is how I became me." The most reflective of the set: she recalls that within about half a year of posting to Tumblr, messages arrived in large quantities, mostly from abroad, and states her interest in brightness that conceals darkness — "even bright things can harbor tremendous darkness," in translation — along with an insistence that self-assessment matters more than others' opinions.

2019 — VICE Photo Issue

Print-issue feature on her examination of identity stereotypes, setting cultural clichés against grotesque or awkward elements; records her citation of the surrealists as inspiration. Establishes where the work stood at the end of the decade — after which the interview record, like the exhibition record, goes quiet.