TAB Event - Aiko Miyanaga "Dwelling in a Boat"

Aiko Miyanaga "Dwelling in a Boat"

This event has ended.
At Mizuma Art Gallery
Media: Installation

Aiko Miyanaga was born in Kyoto in 1974. She has gained a fast reputation for her work shown together with Katsuhiko Hibino at the Oyamazaki Sanso Museum (2004), at a solo show at the Sumida Riverside Hall Gallery (2007), and most recently the Busan Biennale (2008). Her naphthalene installation at Shiseido Gallery this January and participation in the ongoing Artist File 2009 show at the National Art Center Tokyo have also established her as an artist to watch.

Miyanaga's work is known for its gradual changes that unravel over the course of its exhibition period. Her everyday objects made out of naphthalene, which sublimates and evaporates at room temperature, are some of her representative works. Displayed in an acrylic case, these works slowly lose the form initially imparted to them by the artist. Like the hands of a clock, these changes are not actually seen: viewers become aware of them only as hints and indications. Naphthalene, whose shape gradually dissolves and seems to lose its shape, in fact recrystallizes inside the case. The objects in the case register on our retinas as material that has come to a halt, as it were; our eyes also become aware of a time different to that which flows on inside the case. What we see, therefore, is not "material," but a crystallized "phenomenon." The everlastingness that was the original aim of art is actualized here in a paradoxical fashion through a procedure of loss. For viewers, these vestiges and traces of eternity are consolidated in Miyanaga's work.

At this exhibition, Miyanaga presents an integrated interpretation of "time," a single, long-lasting moment that floats in the gloomy space of the gallery, concealing states of waking and sleepiness - waking "time" and sleeping "time." Sleep implies being awake, and its silence is always being swayed.

[Image: Aiko Miyanaga, "Nagi no Todoku Asa" (detail), 2008, naphthalene and mixed media, Busan Biennale Sea Art Festival. Photo by Aiko Miyanaga]