The girl who photographs her own disappearance: Izumi Miyazaki's deadpan self-portraits

In a photograph from 2015 titled Until I Become An Object, Izumi Miyazaki is cut in half like a fish. The image records a death, or something adjacent to one, and nobody in the frame — least of all the artist, who is its only inhabitant — appears to mind. That indifference is the whole apparatus. Across the self-portraits that carried Miyazaki from a student Tumblr account to a first solo exhibition in Luxembourg, the same transaction repeats: the body is sliced, served, multiplied, replaced by food or furniture, and the face registers nothing. The pictures are routinely described as funny, and they are. But the joke has a precise structure, and the structure is worth taking apart, because what these photographs stage, over and over, with the flat competence of a product shot, is the artist's own disappearance — observed by the artist, without comment.

The occasion for this file is a matter of record. Cute and Cruel – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (30 Jun – 30 Jul 2016), catalogued here as WPG.07, was Miyazaki's first solo exhibition anywhere, mounted the summer she graduated from Musashino Art University in Tokyo. The exhibition history says what happened; the dossier holds the biography and the interview index. This essay makes the other argument — from the pictures, not the life — about why the work landed the way it did, and why it still reads as sharply a decade on.

The face that refuses

Start with the face, since the face is where the pictures tell the viewer how to behave, and Miyazaki's tells the viewer nothing. She appears in nearly every photograph she has published: a young woman with a black bob, photographed frontally or in profile, in kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms and suburban streets, and she does not smile. It's Nice That, covering the work in June 2016 as the Luxembourg show opened, noted the deadpan as the constant amid the mayhem. The refusal is not sullenness. It is closer to the discipline of a straight man in a comedy duo: the catastrophe — a head sliced like a loaf of bread, ketchup standing in for consequences — performs, and the face declines to confirm that anything has happened.

The deadpan does two jobs at once. First, it keeps the violence comic. The imagery, inventoried plainly, is grim: decapitation, bisection, a body on a cutting board. Played with any expression at all — fear, complicity, even irony — the pictures would tip into horror or, worse, into camp. Expressionlessness withholds the cue, and the withheld cue is what makes the viewer laugh, uneasily, at material that should not be funny. Miyazaki has been explicit about the aim. She told CNN Style in August 2016 that she wanted to share a feeling of mortality with others in a comical way — a sentence worth rereading, because most artists who claim mortality as a subject do not mean the comedy, and most comic photographers do not mean the mortality.

Second, the blank face detaches the person from the body. Whatever happens to the figure in the frame — and something always happens to it — the face declares itself elsewhere, unimplicated, a bystander at its own dismemberment. This is the formal seed of the disappearance argument: the pictures divide "Miyazaki the image" from "Miyazaki the witness," and side, every time, with the witness. The face that refuses to react is a face already halfway out of the picture.

The body replaced by lunch

Then there is the food, which is not a prop but a method. The titles read like a grocery list, and the dating shows how early the system was in place: Pan (2013), bread; Sandwich (2014); Fish and Tomato (2015); Rice Ball Mountain (2016); Broccoli (2017); Taraco (2018); Ikura (2019). In these pictures food is never simply eaten. It substitutes. A salmon fillet takes the place of hair; a tomato mirrors and stands in for a head; sardines become eyebrows; the artist's own head is plated and served, garnished, as though the kitchen had processed her along with the vegetables. The exchange runs in both directions — the body becomes food, the food becomes a body — and both directions arrive at the same place: the self as one more object in the domestic inventory, handled with the same efficiency as the rest of the shopping.

The staging matters as much as the substitution. These are not gothic tableaux. The light is even and commercial; the settings are ordinary Japanese interiors, rendered without atmosphere; the retouching is precise and deliberately unshowy, deployed until the impossible looks routine. The pictures borrow the rhetoric of the product photograph — centered subject, clean ground, everything legible at a glance — and the borrowed rhetoric is the second half of the joke. A product shot exists to present an object for consumption. Miyazaki's self-portraits use exactly that grammar and put herself in the object position, presented for consumption in the most literal sense available. Until I Become An Object is, on this reading, less a title than a thesis statement, and the food pictures are its proofs, one course at a time.

It would be easy to read all this as macabre, and the 2016 exhibition title — Cute and Cruel — shows the gallery understood the temptation and the trap. The work is both at once, and the conjunction is load-bearing. Cuteness here is not decoration on top of cruelty; it is the delivery system. The bright palette, the round faces of rice balls, the tidy compositions: these are what allow the pictures to smuggle a meditation on being consumed — by others, by images, by the ordinary appetite of daily life — past the viewer's defenses. Miyazaki put the principle plainly in a September 2018 interview with Numéro TOKYO: "even bright things can harbor tremendous darkness," in translation. The sentence describes her pictures exactly, and in that order — the brightness first, the darkness harbored inside it.

A double me

The third recurring device is multiplication. Miyazaki appears twice, or many times, in a single frame: as executioner and executed, as diner and dinner, as a crowd of identical bystanders attending an event that concerns only herself. The publisher of her 2018 monograph Me and Me — the title itself is the device — describes her popping up everywhere in her photographs, "floating, split in half, multiplying" amid settings transfigured by her outlook. Doubling is the oldest trick in the self-portrait book, but Miyazaki's version has a specific temperature. Her doubles do not confront each other, as doubles do in the Romantic tradition, and they do not menace. They coexist, incuriously, like strangers on a platform.

The artist has given the device an origin that is disarmingly practical. An only child, she told CNN Style: "I don't feel lonely when I make and watch photos of a double me." Taken seriously — and there is no reason not to — the sentence reframes the entire body of work. The multiplied selves are company. The camera manufactures a population for a solitude, and the violence the doubles inflict or ignore is the ordinary roughness of siblings who never existed. In the same interview she resisted the idea of a signature altogether: "I don't really feel that I have a style." The disclaimer is contradicted by every frame — few photographers of her generation are more identifiable at a glance — but it is consistent with the pictures' governing fiction, which is that no one in particular is responsible, that the catastrophes simply occur, that the author has already left.

Here the essay's title earns its keep. A self-portrait is conventionally an act of self-assertion: the artist insists on presence, on being seen on her own terms. Miyazaki's self-portraits invert the genre. Presence is asserted only to be processed — sliced, served, duplicated into anonymity — and the terms on which she is seen are the terms of the object world. What the viewer watches, picture after picture, is a young woman documenting her own conversion into things, calmly, as though filing a report. That the reports are funny does not soften the finding; it is the finding. Disappearance, in this work, is not a tragedy. It is a daily procedure, like lunch.

The Tumblr vernacular and the surrealist alibi

The work has two commonly cited lineages, and both are true while neither is sufficient. The first is the platform. Miyazaki began posting self-portraits to Tumblr as a student, and she recalled to Numéro TOKYO that within about half a year the messages were arriving in quantity, mostly from abroad. The pictures are native to that economy: square-ready, legible in a feed, delivering their reversal in the first second of looking. Critics of the 2016 wave read them as satire of the selfie — the publisher's copy for Me and Me makes the same claim — and the reading holds as far as it goes. A selfie exists to say here I am; these pictures use the selfie's own frontal grammar to say here I go. But satire alone would have dated by now, and the work has not, because the target was never really the phone in the mirror. It was the older and more durable question of what a person becomes when she turns herself into an image — a question every self-portraitist since the invention of the medium has had to hold, and which the selfie era merely made universal.

The second lineage is surrealism, and Miyazaki has claimed it herself, with characteristic dryness: "I was never interested in art classes at school apart from when we were studying Surrealism," she told Sleek in 2020. The affinity is real — the bisected bodies and displaced objects have obvious ancestors in the painted tradition — but her surrealism is stripped of the movement's metaphysics. There is no dream logic here, no unconscious erupting into the visible. Her impossibilities are administered, not dreamt: executed in even light, in real kitchens, with the finish of catalogue photography. If the historical surrealists estranged the ordinary to reveal the marvelous, Miyazaki runs the operation backwards — she domesticates the marvelous until it files in with the groceries. The IMA interview of June 2018 framed her, accurately, in terms of millennial photographic expression and irony; the irony is precisely this refusal to let the extraordinary claim its own significance.

What remains, once both lineages have contributed their share, is a tone that belongs to her alone. In the same Sleek interview she offered the nearest thing to a method statement in her record: "Self-portraits are the best way for me to create something. I'm not really any good with people." The line has the same structure as the photographs — a bright, practical surface over a quietly devastating admission — and it locates the work's authority. These are not pictures about the idea of alienation. They are dispatches from inside it, composed by someone who solved the problem of being looked at by getting there first.

What Luxembourg saw

All of this is what a visitor to 22, rue Louvigny encountered in the summer of 2016, whether or not it was named this way at the time. Cute and Cruel – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (30 Jun – 30 Jul 2016) gave the pictures what the feed could not: scale, sequence, and walls — the conditions under which repetition stops reading as content and starts reading as form. Seen one at a time online, a Miyazaki photograph is a joke with excellent timing. Seen as a room, the work discloses its actual shape: the same face, the same refusals, the same procedures of vanishing, iterated with the patience of a catalogue. The show's afterlife in print — no other exhibition in the chronology was written about as widely, or for as long afterwards — suggests the room made its point.

The record after the room is another matter, kept separately as an open file: the monograph and the Kyoto festival presentation of 2018, the Montreal biennale of 2019, and the long quiet since are dated in Where is Izumi Miyazaki? The record since 2018. It is tempting, and too neat, to read that quiet through the pictures — the artist who photographed her own disappearance, finally succeeding. The temptation should be resisted; careers are not artworks, and the file stays open. What can be said from the pictures is only this: no photographer of her cohort built a more coherent machine for looking at self-erasure without flinching, and the machine was already complete, and completely hers, on the walls of a small gallery in Luxembourg the summer she left art school.