Miwa Yanagi

by Chizuko Ueno

The Japanese artist Miwa Yanagi achieved her breakthrough into the international art world with the photo series Elevator Girls , which intermingled the twin themes of consumer culture and the role of women. Originally begun as a performance project, Elevator Girls depicts groups of women in identical uniform enclosed in regimented consumer spaces. The Girls , modeled on the young women who operate elevators in Japanese department stores, stand in as a symbol of the repressive strictures governing the behavior of young women in contemporary Japanese society. Yanagi's latest series, My Grandmothers , is a penetrating and fantastic analysis of the future dreams of young women. Using makeup and computer manipulation, she shows her protagonists as they imagine they will look and live in 50 years. Accompanied by brief, suggestive texts based on conversations with her subjects, these personal visions of life in the year 2050 run the gamut from a purple-haired grandma riding shotgun on her young stud's motorcycle to a lonely elegant woman eating alone on a train. This first monograph on Miwa Yanagi includes work ranging from 1994 to three new images produced in early 2004.

Genres: Photography

121 pages, Hardcover

First published August 2, 2004

About the author

Chizuko Ueno is a Japanese sociologist and Japan's "best-known feminist".

Her research field includes feminist theory, family sociology, and women's history. She is best known for her contribution to gender studies in Japan. As a public intellectual, she played a central role in creating the field of gender studies in Japanese academia. At the same time, her radical tendency and strong character has invited criticism (she described herself as "critical, assertive, and disobedient").

Ueno is a trenchant critic of postwar revisionism and criticizes the whitewashing of Japanese history, which she claims attempts to justify its colonialism, wartime atrocities, and racism both before and after World War II. In particular, she has defended the compensation of Korean comfort women who were forced into prostitution by the Empire of Japan.

Reviews

[Petalbooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

"It's cool to be weird."

[Tjallien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great series!