The exhibition overlaps with Houston's FotoFest, the city-wide biennial that brings hundreds of writers, art critics, and photographers to Houston.
Since Miwa Yanagi's first solo exhibition in Japan in 1993, her work has appeared in exhibitions worldwide. Peter C. Marzio, director, said, "The MFAH is pleased to once again present the powerful work of Miwa Yanagi, whom audiences first encountered in Houston in 2003 during the landmark History of Japanese Photography, which was organized by the museum under the guidance of Anne Wilkes Tucker. The museum is grateful to Deutsche Bank for sharing this exhibition."
"In her relatively short career, Yanagi has already claimed recognition on the international photography scene and has created three distinctive series," said Tucker, the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the MFAH. "Each of the series she has produced—Elevator Girls, My Grandmothers, and Fairy Tale—grapples with feminist issues. Her photographs comment on societal expectations, stereotyping, and role-playing, and in their complexity challenge the viewer to uncover the layers of meaning."
Miwa Yanagi: Deutsche Bank Collection
The photographs of Miwa Yanagi explore the role of women in the context of Japanese society, yet reflect the archetypal concerns of women across cultures. Mixing both the imaginary and the real, Yanagi conjures compelling visions in her large-format compositions using theatrical set-ups and mesmerizing color. The MFAH installation comprises three series—Elevator Girls, begun in 1993, My Grandmothers, started in 1999, and Fairy Tale, dating from 2004—as well as two videos, Kagome Kagome, from 1994, and Girls in Her Sand, 2004. The exhibition premiered at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York last spring.
The Elevator Girls series was inspired by Japan's dutiful elevator greeters: beautiful, slender, young girls in uniforms and white gloves who welcome visitors into hotel and department store elevators. The photographs, many of them large-format, feature groups of identically dressed female models posed in the sterile, deserted environment of modern-day shopping malls. The series evokes questions about Japan's stereotypical elevator girls and the standardization of women in societal roles. Yanagi has stated that the series is about "myself and other Japanese women" in today's society.
Yanagi created the ongoing Grandmother series as a response to the youthful subjects of Elevator Girls. In this series, Yanagi has collaborated with young models to project their dreams of themselves 50 years into the future. After interviewing her models, Yanagi uses costumes, wigs, and makeup in digitally altered images to portray their personal visions of life in old age. Related texts accompany the colorful images, which depict a startling array of independent, triumphant, attractive women.
In Fairy Tale, Yanagi reinvents well-known Western fairy tales such as Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding Hood to explore the underlying meaning of the tales. All of the characters in the photos are either young or old, but all are played by young girls, and the only indication of age is through the wigs and makeup the young girls wear. Shot in black-and-white, the photos are troubling and complex.
Both of Yanagi's video works to date will be presented: Kagome Kagome, 1998, and Girls in Her Sand, 2004. Girls was inspired by Kobo Abe's 1962 novel Woman of the Dunes and the subsequent 1964 film by the Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara. In the book and film, the protagonists cannot leave their home, which is continually engulfed by sand dunes. Yanagi sets the video just beyond the entrance of a tent, toward the dunes beyond. In the exhibition, the video is shown within the confines of a tent suspended from the ceiling, so the viewer watches a video of the dunes "outside." The 1964 film will screen at the MFAH in mid-April. Kagome Kagome draws on Yanagi's early career as a performance artist. The works' title associates the aimless wandering of the young women in and out of long corridors in the DVD with a Japanese children's guessing game involving membership in, and, alternatively, exclusion from a group. -- www.mfah.org
