Ninagawa Mika..a Japanese photographer who excelled at capturing fleeting moments
Ninagawa Mika.
Any discussion of Ninagawa Mika must start with her family background. Mika is a descendant of world-renowned theater director Ninagawa Yukio and actress Mayama Tomoko, and considers her two actresses cousins, Ninagawa Yuki and Ninagawa Miho, to be part of her extended family. She was undoubtedly brought up in an unnaturally rich family environment.
It is clear that her upbringing in the family of many of her closest relatives who built successful careers in the creative arts has had a profound impact on Ninagawa's private life and career. In addition to the obvious advantages, this kind of upbringing can also be quite stressful but she has used her family background as a springboard for her photography career. From the beginning, she relied on her theatrical feel, which she inherited from her parents. When she was younger people referred to her as the daughter of Ninagawa Yukio, but today the situation has reversed as it is common for people to refer to Yukio as the father of Ninagawa Mika. This change in the level of fame among the people is a testament to the profile she built during her career as a photographer and film director.
The trend of “girly pictures” and beyond
Born in 1972 in Higashikurumi, west of Tokyo, Ninagawa attended a private school, Toho High School for Girls, before studying photographic design at Tama University of the Arts. She has seemed to have had at least some interest in photography since a young age, and has said in interviews that she remembers taking pictures of Barbie dolls as a child and displaying them among the dramatic volcanic rocks of Onyoshidashi on Mt. Asama.
But her serious interest in photography started when she was in university. She began submitting her work to competitions and rose to prominence in 1996 when she won her first prestigious awards for emerging photographers including the “Grand Prize for Photography at Hitotsputin Exhibition” and a special commendation in the “New Universe Photography” competition. In 1998 she won the "Konica Incentive Picture Award" and used scholarship money to fund a series of travels in which she continued to develop her vision and personality as an artist. That year she published her first picture book, 17 9 '97.
From the photo collection 17 9'97 (Photo courtesy of Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery).
Ninagawa's first appearance in the fashion world was with what were called “girl portraits,” which are essentially photographic depictions of young women based primarily on themes from everyday life. Since the early 1990s, the balance in the number of male and female students in the photography departments of universities and specialized photography schools has shifted, with female students becoming more than male students for the first time.
Technological innovations and the ease of availability of small, simple-to-use cameras and color printers have enabled a wider range of people to access the world of photography than ever before, and young women in particular are beginning to use it as a means of self-affirmation and self-expression by capturing vibrant images of the details of daily life in the world they live in. Among this new generation, artists such as Nagashima Yori and Hiromex, two young women, emerged whose works had a distinctive brilliance as if they were a new starting point in the world of photography completely different from what it was before. For a while, the new style became one of the defining trends in Japanese photography.
Much of Ninagawa's early works fall into the category of girl portraits. Her favorite photography subjects are “selfies (including nudity)”, shots of her family and friends, travel photos and interior scenes. Although she could have chosen to distance herself from that trend that was enjoying a period of prosperity, she chose God and ride the wave of his popularity. She had the confidence to use the directing ability she had inherited from her father to connect with her subjects and exercise artistic control over her subjects, and soon developed a knack for capturing fleeting moments in her photographs. She also had another weapon in her arsenal, a sense of color that was fueled by her bold use of dazzling primary colors. Perhaps it was something she inherited from her mother, who was a quilt artist as well as an actress. In those early years of her artistic career, she often used a color reproduction machine with a color adjustment feature, which helped make her work a vibrant palette based on saturated primary colors.
With her second photo collection, Baby Blue Sky, published in 1999, she began creating her own art space. She distanced herself from her peers and away from photography for herself and her friends, replacing this with dynamic shots, many taken while traveling and distinguished by a sense of vibrant color and speed. It was around this time that she began activating her inherited dramatic instincts in a series of amazing commercial projects in the worlds of advertising and fashion. Many of them have been collected in two books: "Pink Roses Suite", which includes her advertising work, and "Sugar and Spices", which contains a selection of her fashion photographs. In 2001, she was one of 3 young women (along with Nagashima Yuri and Hiromex) to be honored with the prestigious Kimura Ihei Photography Award.
From the 'Pink Roses Pavilion' collection (Photo courtesy of Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery).
From the “Sugar and Spices” collection (Photo courtesy of Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery).
A growing artistic sense
Her award of the Kimura Ihei Prize gave a new impetus and direction to Ninagawa's work, which broadened her interest and themes. Her work is no longer confined to the radiant, radiant shots of moments of joy in which the photographer and the subject seem to share a moment of joy. It turned to nature and human attempts to clone alternatives, taking close-up pictures of artificial petals and flowers (perhaps in the height of industrialization) and colorful images of goldfish.
Many of these images combine the beauty of the term “kawaii” with elements of decorative art. The books that included these pictures featured new concepts of Ninagawa's artistic vision: "Acid Bloom" that caught viewers' eyes in images of a miniature group of flowers captured in untidy detail, "Liquid Dreams", a vibrant group of images of goldfish, and "Eien" no hana (eternal flowers)'' is a group of luxurious, discolored artificial flowers usually placed on graves.
From the ''Acid Bloom'' collection. (Photo courtesy of Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery).
From the ''Liquid Dreams'' collection. (Photo courtesy of Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery).
From the “Eien no hana (Eternal Flowers)” collection (Photo courtesy of Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery).
Other book projects she has completed include 'Noir' and 'Purity of Tokyo'. And while stark primary colors have long been a hallmark of her work, it seems to have resisted her reputation for producing bright, cheerful images brimming with youthful energy. In these two groups, she reviews her interest in some mysterious and strange aspects within the subconscious mind of humans, and indicates that her interests were inclined towards the "death motive" aspect of the Eros/Thanatos dichotomy (sexual desire/death).
From the 'Noir' collection (Photo courtesy of Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery).
From the “Purity of Tokyo” collection. (Photo courtesy of Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery).
cinematic fantasy
Meanwhile, in her business, she has combined her innate sense of color and incredible power of imagination to perfect a style that can be called “new Japanese”. Pictures of Ninagawa that skillfully incorporate elements of the exotic have not only gained popularity in many Asian countries but have also found their way to Europe and North America. The Rizzoli Publishing House in New York has released a volume of her photographs under the title "Mica". It has itself become a "media" commodity with a rare ability to gauge the mood of the times and to create seemingly inexhaustible energy from new images with extraordinary speed.
From the Mika Collection. (Photo courtesy of Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery).
Her tireless creativity led her to try to enter the world of cinema. She directed a series of widely successful works, including "Sakuran (Confusion, 2007), "Hilter Skelter" (2012), "Diner" (2019), and "No Longer Human" (2019), which is a drama About the author Dazai Osamu and his most famous novel.
The first large-scale exhibition of her work was held at the Tokyo Opera City Fair from November to December 2008. The show traveled among several exhibitions on a nationwide tour. Since then her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries over the following years. The solo exhibition "Ninagawa Micha: A Self-Portrait", held from January to May 2015 at the Hara Museum in Tokyo, marked a return to self-portraits. The exhibition "Ninagawa Mecha: Between Fiction and Reality" was initially held at the Kumamoto Museum of Contemporary Art from June to September 2018 and then went on a tour that will last until 2021 and attract a large audience from across the country.
From the exhibition “Ninagawa Mika: A Self-Portrait” (Image credits by Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery).
Return to the starting point
In the following years, Ninagawa continued to deepen and expand her creative fields. One of her noteworthy projects is “Sakura (Cherry Blossoms)” which collected 2,500 photographs of flowers taken after the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011 when Ninagawa - like many in Japan - was affected by the life force of the flowers that continued to bloom amid the devastation and disaster. Among her other works are 'Light of', in which open, extended photographs capture the joy and excitement of fireworks, and 'Beautiful Days', a series of portraits taken around the time of her father's death. The photographs were published as a book in 2017 and were the subject of an exhibition at the Hara Museum in May of that year.
From the "Sakura" collection. (Photo courtesy of Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery).
From the 'Light of' collection (Photo courtesy of Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery).
In June 2020, Ninagawa held an exhibition entitled "Tokyo" at the recently reopened Parko Tokyo Museum in Shibuya. For the first time, her work directly addresses the city in which she was born and raised as she turns her lens on the city and its residents amid the coronavirus pandemic. Most of the photos were taken with a single-use “Fujifilm Otsuron Desu” camera, another indication that the artist is determined to return to her roots by using simple tools again, which she launched in her artistic career.
From the Tokyo Collection (Photo courtesy of Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery).
Today, Ninagawa Mika is an artist whose interests and interests go beyond photography alone. In addition to her film work, Ninagawa is a member of the Executive Board of the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games Organizing Committee. Certainly, her constant creativity and willingness to take on new challenges - as she continues to advance her career - will make her an example for young artists to follow for many years to come.
(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo: From the “Liquid Dreams” collection. Photo courtesy of Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery. All photos by Ninagawa Mika.)
