藝評

(原文以英文發表，評論宮北裕美的作品。)

Water droplets are pearls in a spiral dance. Leaves spread wide open, at once bounteous as palms and agile as the quivering wings of a bird. Their movements are deceptively effortless. In Hiromi Miyakita’s newly conceived installation Suzuo, these moving images are sheltered between crumpled paper. Surfaces are ruffled, edges blurred. The artist finds lightness in gravity, plays with what nature ordains, and gives what’s ordinary a magical twist to present a subdued state of beauty.

Suzuo contains a wealth of elements recurring in the artist’s practice: most prominently, her attention to detail as in the shimmering of each water pearl and her care for the impromptu as in the rhythms naturally arising out of the encounter between one kind of life and another. The human body is regarded in a similar way in Miyakita''s practice – always placed on the edge, inhabiting the edge. While trained professionally as a dancer and choreographer, Miyakita is less interested in formalities, picturesque perspectives, or movements of extremes - jumping, turning, or other acrobatics. Instead, in the ordinary moves of walking, standing, or sitting, she directs her skin to all that which is happening around. Miyakita’s subjectivity is a sensibility that perceives beyond the immediate, and a sensuality that receives that which touches her as a body passing in time, provisionally in human form. Her arms are crooked branches, her finger tips become morning dew. Nature is her material. Air is her song.

Cleansed of the obstinacy of the artist self, Miyakita’s work seeks to harvest from each and every object – a paper clip, a yarn ball, a tissue paper – a universe. She reaches out to aliveness itself – be it in a pulse, or in the light of dawn. Her practice is in this sense ecological – exploring the dynamic and interdependent relations between the myriad of things in nature and the humanly devised, generating new ones. It elucidates magnificence itself, albeit miniscule or hidden, but always already immanent.


First published by 3331 Art Chiyoda, Tokyo, November 2019
https://www.3331.jp/schedule/en/004938.html