 For the loan of the works, please contact to MIACA; info@miaca.org
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| Mio Shirai |
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Shirai has made conceptual art pieces in various diverse media such as photography, ready made furniture, wood and metal. In 1993, Shirai won a grant from the Asian Cultural Council program and stayed in New York until 2006.
She started making video work after she got back to Japan in 2006. Her first moving image work is "The Trilogy for Art". The three chapters of the video work show the relationship between art and creativity from different points of view.
Mio Shirai graduated from the Tokyo University of the Arts. She lives in Tokyo and works in Yokohama. She has participated in many group shows, including the seventh India Triennial, "The Silent Passion" at the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan; "Bolande, Dopitova, Rist, Shirai" at the Prague City Museum in the Czech Republic, and the Tsumari Art Triennial in Japan. "The Trilogy of Art" was shown in the "Artists File" exhibition in Tokyo's National Art Center in 2008.
*1. The Creative Act
‘The Creative Act’ was a speech presented by Marcel Duchamp in 1957 in Houston, Texas and Shirai herself reads it in English, as images of a variety of artists are shown. Duchamp's statement resounds with irony when combined with highly vernacular scene such as Yokohama, Kogane-cho, Miyakobashi-Market that embodies the country's post-war history. In regard to the foundations of contemporary Japan, what sort of significance and power do art and young artists have?
2. Restaurant Wild Cat House
This is adaptation of Kenji Miyazawa children’s story ‘The restaurant of Many Orders’, and was shot at a permanent installation with the same title that Shirai created on the site of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial. In both works, some doors with strange “orders” printed on them appear one after another in front of two gentlemen who are visiting an amazing restaurant in the middle of the mountains. They perform in accordance with the directions on the doors then as the story reaches its climax, they suddenly realize that they are about to be eaten.
3.L’Amour
Men look like yakuza are playing mahjong in a mountain cabin, but before me know it, angel wings have grown out of their backs, and the two quickly try to shed their jackets. Good and evil, black and white, sacred and profane― These contradictory elements all ultimately converge in Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Annunciation’ picture; or in other words, " art". It is as if the prediction that Duchamp made in ‘The Creative Act’ actually come to pass.*
*1~3, text by Yusuke Minami (Curator, The National Art Center, Tokyo)
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© Mio Shirai
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