Kazuko Miyamoto at Japan Society
Kazuko Miyamoto, Stunt (181 Chrystie Street, 1981), 1982. Unique photocopy. Courtesy of the artist; EXILE, Vienna.
Kazuko Miyamoto, Male, 1974, Industrial cotton string, and nails. Courtesy of the artist and Zürcher Gallery, New York/Paris.
Image of the artist installing Sail at Nobe Gallery in 1979. Courtesy of the artist; EXILE, Vienna
Yoshiko Chumain in Kazuko Miyamoto, A Girl on Trail Dinosaur, 1979, Video. Courtesy of the artist; EXILE, Vienna.
Kazuko Miyamoto, Target Kimono, 2005, fabric. Courtesy of the artist and Zürcher Gallery, New York/Paris.
Portait of Kazuko Miyamoto, 1973. Courtesy of the artist; EXILE, Vienna.
Tension is generated by taut and delicate strings tethered to clusters of neatly hammered nails. Artist Kazuko Miyamoto's spatial string constellations resemble waves, the expanding universe, a wheat field from the vantage point of a moving train, or the inside of a shell. The images these strings and hardware conjure are representative of expansive and organic systems connected to life and growth. Like a game of cat's cradle or enchanting string instruments, Miyamoto's installations evoke kinetic rhythm and movement that considers perception and the body's relationship to space.
To Perform a Line is Kazuko Miyamoto's first institutional survey and the first time a number of works are on view to the public. The exhibition at the Japan Society, on view through July 10, highlights the artist's most significant bodies of work–including drawing, painting, installation, and performance–spanning from the time she moved to New York in the early 1960s to the present.
Welcoming viewers into the exhibition space, a series of images that depict Miyamoto performing and making work in her studio offers the audience a sense of the artist’s vibrant life and practice. The self-portrait titled Stunt (181 Christie Street) captures the artist standing naked on her head with a series of Sol Lewitt cubes in the background. Miyamoto was LeWitt's first studio assistant and lifelong friend, and while LeWitt undoubtedly influenced her, she would develop her own approach to minimalism that challenged white-male avant-garde understandings of postminimalism and abstraction by inserting her own subjectivity. In this self-portrait, Miyamoto’s arched and extended limbs seem to mime the string constructions in the gallery, inserting her intention to quite literally turn minimalism on its head.
Miyamoto's spatial string constructions–cotton strings stretched and tethered to the wooded floorboards–extend outward to the viewer and create a tension that suggests the artist's subjectivity and the strength and strain felt by women artists of color. This corporeal minimalism presents the body as both absent and present (the physical manifestation of her labor), fixed and abstract, self-contained and expansive. Simultaneously disorienting and provoking, these suspended strings take on different shapes when viewed from different angles and appear as if they could vanish or suck you right into them. Playing with volume, space, and perception, Miyamoto activates the audience by drawing them to move around the work physically. The work’s relational nature–between the strings and nails, art and audience–speaks to the artist's interest in collaboration and performance. A television monitor resting on the gallery floor plays archival footage of the collaborative performance, Trail Dinosaur, from 1979, featuring a Japanese American dancer and choreographer performing with and activating the string constructions. The dancer's body pulses and sways in a ballad that oscillates between states of embrace and resistance. Together, these works seem to allude to the endurance and resilience of women’s bodies.
We see early examples of Miyamoto exploring lines and space through drawing and painting in the second gallery. Miyamoto employs and implicates her own body in the sleek, yellow, minimalist sculpture titled String around a cylinder of my height (1977) which, as the title suggests, is structurally dictated by the artist’s height–another example of the artist contemplating the relationship between the body and space. Situated in the third gallery space, we see Miyamoto insert her identity and personal narrative more directly and figuratively through a series of assemblage kimonos made of newsprint, tin cans, family heirlooms, and hand-embroidered fabrics that reference her particular body and history.
There is an invisible energy that surges through Miyamoto’s work. This energy, or perhaps “spirit” is a better word, seems to evoke the invisible work of women, particularly Asian American women, that is often collaborative, communal, and hidden. Miyamoto’s attention to the body and use of everyday material is in line with a history of women artists working in the 1960s and 1970s whose practices articulated particular histories and experiences. Miyamoto offers a distinctive and expansive kind of corporeal minimalism emblematic of her personal experience and cultural heritage. This exhibition reveals the numerous ways in which Miyamoto’s work expands and decenters dominant art histories and theories, and calls attention to the lack of representation and critical appreciation surrounding her long career.