Beschreibung:

ULTIMATE Mika Ninagawa Follow earthly flowers, heavenly colors executed 2018 Unique installation, comprising two chromogenic prints and two wall vinyl. Each image: 181.3 x 120.8 cm (71 3/8 x 47 1/2 in.) Each frame: 186 x 125.4 cm (73 1/4 x 49 3/8 in.) Each vinyl: variable size up to 250 x 166.6 cm (98 3/8 x 65 5/8 in.) maximum Signed in ink, printed title and date on a Certificate of Authenticity accompanying the work. This installation is unique and site specific. Please note that the two wall vinyl will be printed after the sale to the owner’s specifications within the dimensions referenced above and can only be installed once.
Provenance From the artist Literature M. Ninagawa, 桜 / Sakura , Tokyo : Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2011, n.p. M. Ninagawa, earthly flowers, heavenly colors , Tokyo: Matori Publishing, 2017, n.p. For variant crops Catalogue Essay In our first Evening edition of ULTIMATE, we are thrilled to premiere earthly flowers, heavenly colors , 2018, a unique installation by Mika Ninagawa. The subject sakura [cherry blossoms] is one of the artist’s signature motifs. In this dynamic work, seemingly contrasting notions of life and death, natural and artificial, traditional and contemporary converge. Through this portal, we are invited to enter Ninagawa’s distinctive world, populated by vivid colours and dense imagery. In Mika Ninagawa: In Conversation , Phillips’ Yuka Yamaji and the artist discussed beginnings, her springtime addiction to sakura and why she photographs. For over two decades, Mika Ninagawa has walked her own path, becoming the first and only woman photographer to have attained pop icon status in Japan. Daughter of acclaimed theatre director Yukio Ninagawa, she first came to prominence in the late 1990s as one of the leading lights of Japan’s ‘Girly Photo’ movement. Her work was first exhibited outside Japan in 1997 at the iconic Parisian concept store Colette, and in 2001, at the age of 29, she received the 26th Kimura Ihei Award (Japan’s most prestigious photography award). Since then, Ninagawa has gone on to set new museum attendance records in Japan with her travelling exhibition Mika Ninagawa: earthly flowers, heavenly colors in 2008-10, as well as in Taiwan with her first overseas retrospective, which was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei in 2016. Branching out into filmmaking in 2006, Ninagawa has directed two successful feature films to date – Sakuran (2007) and Helter Skelter (2012) – and is set to release two new films in 2019. In 2014, she was appointed to the executive board of the 2020 Tokyo Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games by virtue of her contributions to Japanese art and culture. Ninagawa has published extensively, including nearly 100 photobooks to date, and her work is held in many prominent collections, which include the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam and UBS Art Collection. Beginnings. Yuka Yamaji: When we were walking together in London on your recent visit, we kept losing you whenever something would catch your eye and you would stop to shoot it. When did you first realise that you were addicted to photography? Mika Ninagawa: I was in primary school. My father was a theatre director and my mother was an actress, so I wanted to become a person who can express something as soon as possible. I think it was a very primitive desire, a feeling close to impatience. I did a lot of things like drawing and crafting but taking photographs became a special thing. YY: And what kind of pictures were you taking? MN: When I was about 10 years old, I used an ordinary point-and-shoot camera to photograph my own reflections in the mirror or my much-loved Barbie dolls on top of volcanic rocks, which I also loved! [Laughs] YY: What drew you to this particular medium? MN: How emotion and expression are directly connected... my emotions were captured, as if no impurities existed between what I felt and the camera, and that made me become increasingly addicted to photography. Even to this day, when I concentrate, I feel the boundary between what I am shooting and myself gently disappearing. YY: Tokyo in the late 1990s saw the rise of「女の子写真」 [ Onnanoko shashin ] , the ‘Girly Photo’ movement, which was characterised by images reflecting the personal and the everyday taken by young women photographers and you were brought into the limelight as one of its stars. What was that like? MN: Because I wanted to quickly become a person who expressed something, it was a very lucky movement for me. But at the same time, I was in a very dangerous situation of being easily consume