Good Girls - Bad Girls
Miwa Yanagi's Works from the
Deutsche Bank Collection at the Chelsea Art Museum
Miwa
Yanagi, Yuka, 2000, from the series Grandmothers,
Deutsche Bank
Collection
© Miwa Yanagi
Currently, the mammoth show Global
Feminisms at the Brooklyn
Museum in New York is presenting a résumé of present-day international
feminist art that includes the works of around 100 women artists from over
50 countries. The exhibition presents many newcomers that haven't yet
shown in New York, along with established names such as Tracey
Moffatt, Jenny
Saville, and Catherine
Opie. Or the Japanese artist Miwa
Yanagi. Her photo work Yuka from the series My Grandmothers
portrays an older woman sitting in the side wagon of a motorcycle,
cruising along the American West Coast. Her flaming red hair whips in the
wind, her hand with garishly polished fingernails grips a cigarette, and a
broad grin spreads across her face; this grandmother seems to be enjoying
life to the fullest. But there are more of Yanagi's grandmothers to be
seen in New York: the Chelsea Art
Museum has given the art photographer her first American solo show.
Lender and sponsor of the show is Deutsche
Bank, whose collection
provides the new video and the more than 30 photographic works in the
exhibition.
"Miwa
Yanagi: Deutsche Bank Collection" at the Chelsea Art Museum, exhibition
view
The Kyoto-based artist became known with
her Elevator Girls - young uniformed women posing before surreal
architectural backdrops. Yanagi's photographs, which she painstakingly
manipulates on the computer, investigate stereotypical women's roles in
Japanese society. In the series My
Grandmothers, which she has been working on since 1999, her models
have forfeited their youth. Aged with the help of make-up and digital
retouching, they act out their fantasies of what they hope their life will
be like in fifty years' time. Yanagi's latest series Fairy Tales
leads us into disturbing enchanted worlds where episodes from Rapunzel
and Snow White
are subversively staged. The innocent young heroines of these tales mutate
into threatening, often evil creatures.
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Miwa Yanagi, Rapunzel, 2004, from the
series Fairy Tales,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
©Miwa Yanagi
On
the occasion of the exhibition, a discussion among prestigious
participants took place at the Chelsea Art Museum. One of the people on
the podium was the author and New York
Times essayist Peggy Orenstein,
one of America's leading experts on equal rights and gender roles. In her
bestseller SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap
, she writes about young women's identity problems, while her
autobiographical book Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents,
Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, An Oscar, An Atomic Bomb, A
Romantic Night and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother is currently
creating a sensation.
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Miwa Yanagi and Liz Christensen,
Deutsche Bank Art New York
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Miwa Yanagi elucidated her work in a discussion with Peggy
Orenstein, Anne
Tucker, head curator for photography at the Museum
of Fine Arts in Houston, and Manon
Slome, head curator of the Chelsea Art Museum. The discussion focused
on investigations into the themes of sex, body images, and age; this
discourse takes on heightened relevance in view of other current
exhibitions such as Global Feminisms and Wack! Art and the
Feminist Revolution at the Museum
of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which calls attention to the
beginnings of feminist art.
Miwa Yanagi: Deutsche Bank
Collection
May 4 - August 25, 2007
The Chelsea Art Museum
New York
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