Where is Izumi Miyazaki? The record since 2018

Subject

Izumi Miyazaki (b. 1994, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan), photographic self-portraiture

Baseline at the gallery

WPG.07 Cute and Cruel – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (30 Jun – 30 Jul 2016) — her first solo exhibition

Coverage of this file

April 2018 – August 2026

Status

Open. Documented additions are invited via the contact form.

The question in this article's title gets asked, in English and in Japanese, and the searchable web does not answer it. Between 2014 and 2019, Izumi Miyazaki was one of the most visible young photographers in the world: a Tumblr account opened in 2012 became TIME coverage, a CNN interview, a first solo exhibition in Luxembourg, a Fondazione Prada group show, a festival takeover in Kyoto, a biennale in Montreal, and a Valentino capsule collection. Then the trail thins, and after the beginning of 2020 it very nearly stops. No obituary of the career exists because nothing ended in public; no profile of the later years exists because the material for one has not surfaced. What follows is the dated record — what is documented, from where, and exactly when the documentation stops. It is kept deliberately as an open file rather than a conclusion, because an absence of record is not a fact about a person; it is a fact about the record.

The baseline: 2016–2017

The contrast only registers against the density of what came before, so the file begins with a summary of it. Miyazaki's first solo exhibition anywhere was Cute and Cruel – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (30 Jun – 30 Jul 2016), record WPG.07 in this catalogue, mounted the summer she graduated from Musashino Art University; the full account is at the exhibition history, and the pictures themselves are read in the essay in this file. Her first solo show in Japan, Stand-In – Art-U room, Tokyo (2016), followed that winter, closing three days before Give Me Yesterday – Osservatorio, Fondazione Prada, Milan (21 Dec 2016 – 12 Mar 2017), the group exhibition that opened the foundation's photography space. Through it all ran the press wave documented in the dossier's chronology: It's Nice That and Booooooom in June 2016, CNN Style that August, Feature Shoot in July 2017. At the end of 2017 she was, by any measure available to a 23-year-old photographer, ascendant.

2018: the largest year

2018 was the biggest year of the documented career, and it happened almost entirely in Japan. On 13 April 2018, Seigensha in Kyoto published Me and Me, her first monograph, bilingual in Japanese and English and distributed internationally through shashasha. The next day, KYOTOGRAPHIE International Photography Festival opened its sixth edition (14 Apr – 13 May 2018) under the theme "UP," and Miyazaki's presentation, titled UP to ME, occupied the whole of ASPHODEL, a contemporary building in Kyoto's Gion district — new works and installations alongside the self-portraits that made her name, her largest exhibition to date. The festival's framing is worth preserving as a period document: it presented her as the photographer whose "bright and fantastical" pictures the French and American magazines had already claimed, now given a building of her own in the festival's own city. The presentation gathered work reaching back to 2013 — the exhibition page reproduces pan (2013) beside haircut and riceball mountain (both 2016) — so the Kyoto month doubled as the first retrospective look at a career then six years old. The Japanese photography press treated her, that spring, as a headline act: IMA Online published a substantial interview on 22 June 2018, and Numéro TOKYO followed in September with the most reflective interview she has given. Both are annotated in the dossier's interview index.

2019: Valentino, Montreal, London

The following year the record moves through fashion, a fair, and a biennale — and out of Japan. In April 2019 Valentino presented its TKY pre-fall capsule around a Tokyo show, and Miyazaki was among the Japanese artists the house engaged: a series of exclusive images made for the collection, carried on T-shirts, sweaters and tote bags, reported by WWD and Hypebeast in the third week of April. It remains her only documented luxury-fashion commission, and it put the deadpan self-portrait vocabulary on garments sold from Ginza to Fifth Avenue.

That autumn came the largest institutional presentation of her career. MOMENTA Biennale de l'image, Montreal, staged its sixteenth edition, "The Life of Things," from 5 September to 13 October 2019, and included Miyazaki with a body of work that establishes something this file relies on: she was still producing. Alongside Open the Eye and Up, both dated 2018, the biennale showed four works dated 2019 — Gut Feeling, Ikura, Ketchup and Mustard, Taraco — presented in public space through the Mile End district. The biennale's artist page also records a biographical fact no earlier source has: born in Yamanashi, Miyazaki "currently lives in London." The London agency Pocko lists her on its artist roster, and its interview with her describes a recent move to the east of the city. The same season, her Valentino images were exhibited at Unseen Amsterdam (20 – 22 Sep 2019), and VICE's 2019 Photo Issue published her work on identity stereotypes. As of the end of 2019, then: a London address, an agency, a biennale, four new pictures.

January 2020: the last long profile

The last substantial press treatment in the record is a Sleek Magazine profile published on 8 January 2020. It is recognizably a mid-career piece rather than a discovery piece: it counts her Instagram following at 14,000, inventories the Valentino, Unseen and VICE outings of the previous year, and lets her state the terms of the practice plainly — "Self-portraits are the best way for me to create something. I'm not really any good with people." Asked about the work's balance of the comic and the grim, she told Pocko in the same period: "I think what saves me when I'm in difficult situations is humour." Nothing in either interview reads as a farewell. Both read as an artist mid-stride.

After 2020: what the record shows

From 2020 forward, the searchable public record consulted for this file thins to almost nothing. No solo exhibition after the Kyoto presentation of 2018 appears in it. No second monograph appears in it. No dated interview after the early-2020 pair appears in it, in English or Japanese. The features that do continue to circulate — and they circulate steadily, which is its own datum about the work's durability — are reprints and rediscoveries of the 2014–2019 pictures, not reports of new ones.

Two later traces exist, and this file records both precisely because they are so small. First, the secondary market: MutualArt's auction database lists three results for Miyazaki's work, the recorded top price being for a framed photograph titled Tomato, sold at the French auction house Euvrard & Fabre in 2024 for a reported 87 US dollars. A print by an artist whose pictures reached tens of millions of screens changed hands for the price of a dinner — a fact that says less about Miyazaki than about how thinly the editioned-print market ever captured an audience built on Tumblr. Second, the platform where it all began: as of 14 August 2026, the address of her Tumblr account resolves to a login wall rather than a public page, so the archive that launched the career is no longer openly consultable at its original address.

What the absence of record is, and is not

It is worth being exact about what the preceding section establishes, because the "where are they now" genre is prone to treating silence as story. The documented facts are these: the last works with public dates are the four 2019 pictures shown in Montreal; the last dated interviews are from mid-2018 to early 2020; the last recorded address is London; representation by a London agency is still publicly listed. That is the whole of it. A thin public record is compatible with many undocumented realities — commercial work that never gets bylined coverage, work made and not released, a practice paused, a practice continued privately, a life simply lived — and this file asserts none of them. The record shows a career that went quiet in public at the start of the decade; it does not show why, and nothing on this page supplies a reason the sources do not.

The file therefore stays open, on the same terms as the rest of this archive. The rubric's companion file, on Jeanne Susplugas, shows what the opposite case looks like — a Wild Project Gallery artist whose post-gallery record is dense with dated institutional activity — and the contrast is the point of running both. Readers who can extend this one — an exhibition listing with dates, a publication record, a credited commission, anything from 2020 onward that can be sourced — are invited to submit it through the contact form; the corrections page carries the log of changes to the file. For now, the most consulted artist in this archive — see the chronology her Luxembourg summer sits in — is exactly where the file's title leaves her: somewhere past its last dated line.