Kimiyo Mishima

Born in Osaka in 1932, Kimiyo Mishima currently lives and works in Osaka and Gifu, Japan.

A child during WWII, Mishima started painting in her teens as the war ended. She recalls emerging from an air raid shelter to find her city flattened by American bombs, an event that undoubtedly impressed a lasting image of material and information chaos into the young artist’s mind. Throughout her artistic career, which spans over 65 years of activity, Mishima has consistently expressed her “fear and anxiety of drowning in information” through paintings, photographs, ceramics, sculpture and large-scale installations.

In 1971, Mishima developed a method of silk-screen printing the attractive graphics of quick-consumables onto ceramic, and began an ongoing, signature practice of transforming spent, crumpled, and crushed single use items such as beverage cans, newspapers and corrugated boxes into Realist sculpture renderings of “breakable printed materials”.

Nonaka- Hill presented Paintings, a solo show of Mishima, from May 18 – July 14, 2018.