Announcing Representation: Masako Miki
Jessica Silverman is delighted to represent Masako Miki, an artist whose paintings, sculptures, and installations blur the boundaries between the sacred and the secular. Using a variety of materials, including wool, wood, bronze, ink, and watercolor, Miki creates characterful artworks rooted in the Indigenous culture of her Japanese birthplace but informed by the freedom and ambition of three decades of living in California. In dialogue with artists like Ruth Asawa, Joan Miró, Isamu Noguchi, and Marc Chagall, the artist explores the significance of the overlooked and discarded in ways that challenge androcentrism.
All the people on the planet today have evolved from hunter-gatherers who, despite disparate geographies, had parallel worldviews that unanimously embrace animism. Animism is the belief that all things have a spiritual essence. The belief embraces not just animals and plants, but rocks, climatic conditions, and man-made objects. While most industrial nations have lost touch with their Indigenous traditions or relegated them to children’s books, many Japanese have held onto their native convictions in the form of Shintoism, a faith that intermingles harmoniously with the imported religions of Buddhism and Christianity.
Miki’s works explore the idiosyncrasies of Shinto narratives as a potent route to human universals and the affinities that foster community. As Miki explains, “I hope that my works generate the kind of curiosity and empathy that enables us to come together.”
One emblematic gathering is the “Night Parade of 100 Demons,” a Japanese legend in which dozens of beings march for recognition. Explored in many of Miki’s paintings, the procession, which is rarely orderly and often riotous, marks a return of the repressed or abandoned. The characters have fluid identities as they are always self-actualizing through interaction with others – a state masterfully captured by Miki’s watercolor technique.
In a watercolor and ink painting on paper titled Grandpa’s Lacquer Bowls and Golden Stick Conspire (2024), a mischievous wooden sprite colludes with a stack of red lacquer bowls, the moon, a cat, a tote bag, and a plaster wall spirit with four eyes and spindly legs. A blue fox with two tails echoes the coyote tricksters and howling werewolves of other continents’ lore. As it happens, Miki’s grandfather was a lacquer artist while her father was an antique dealer – a profession that, like the “Night Parade,” collects and reevaluates used goods.
Integral to Miki’s practice are handmade wool-felt sculptures that could be trees, chestnuts, waterdrops, mochi treats, or the physical manifestations of sounds. Simultaneously organic and architectural, these works are distinguished by an absence of right angles and other rectilinear forms that might imprison or confine. The characters are all “shapeshifters” who metamorphose and foster change. For example, Rising Prayer Beads (Lime Green) resembles a tree, but it is named for a string of enchanted beads. According to legend, some tools, especially when they are 100 years old, become alive and self-aware. As an instrument of Buddhist enlightenment, prayer beads are particularly resistant to neglect, so they commonly return in animated form.
Bronze sculptures are also a significant part of Miki’s artistic practice. Her outdoor Plant Ghosts are cascading succulents that walk on five fronds. A striped one whose color is described as chartreuse could be a crustacean that has recently emerged from the sea or a toupee swept off the head of a Manga anti-hero. Plant Ghost (Evergreen with Dots), by contrast, suggests its underlying metal foundations through its bronze-colored spots – an inside joke about art fabrication and truth to materials.
An accomplished multimedia artist, Miki brings her distinctive creativity to the tropes of global Indigenous narratives, exposing their relevance to issues of equity and respect. Miki’s practice is playful yet diligent, resistant to static dualisms, and feisty in its advocacy of the power, personality, and wisdom of the natural world.
Masako Miki (b. 1973, Osaka, Japan) will open a two-person exhibition titled “(Super)Natural: Paul Klee and Masako Miki” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on August 17, 2024. Miki has enjoyed solo shows and projects at the de Young Museum, San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), CA; ICA San José, CA; and KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville, KY. Her work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA; BAMPFA; the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, CA; Collección SOLO, Madrid; and Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation, New York, among others. Recent commissions include a site-specific installation for the Minna Natoma Arts Corridor in San Francisco and a permanent installation of bronze sculptures at Uber HQ, San Francisco. Miki has a BFA from Notre Dame de Namur University and an MFA from San José State University, CA. She lives and works in Berkeley, CA. Miki is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, and Ryan Lee, New York. She will have a solo exhibition with Jessica Silverman in 2025.
