Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Sculpture, felt, bronze, installation, watercolor
Website: masakomiki.com
Masako Miki was born in 1973 in Osaka, Japan, and has lived and worked in Berkeley, California for more than thirty years. She received a BFA from Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, and an MFA from San José State University. She has taught at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and Mills College. She is represented by Jessica Silverman in San Francisco and Ryan Lee Gallery in New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, and Colección SOLO in Madrid. Her permanent public commissions include a large-scale bronze installation at Uber Technologies HQ in San Francisco’s Mission Bay (2021), a site-specific installation in the Minna-Natoma Arts Corridor in San Francisco, and a commission for the OH Bay cultural coastal park in Shenzhen, China. She also designed the window installations for Maison Hermès in Ginza, Tokyo. Her awards include the 2018 Inga Maren Otto Fellowship from the Watermill Center in New York and the 2017 Artist Fellow Award from the Kala Art Institute.
Miki makes sculptures, immersive installations, watercolor paintings, and prints rooted in the Shinto and Buddhist traditions of her native Japan — particularly the belief in yokai, shapeshifting spirits that inhabit the boundaries between animate and inanimate, sacred and secular. Her hand-felted sculptures — large-scale, brilliant in color, simultaneously monstrous and playful — take the forms of specific yokai: umbrella ghosts, possessed mirrors, faceless spirits, mushroom ghosts, one-eyed goblins. Bronze versions of the same figures, finished with automobile paint and urethane to achieve a mirror-smooth, jewel-like surface, translate the folkloric forms into a contemporary sculptural idiom. Throughout, Miki’s work proposes new mythologies — using ancient Japanese forms to envision fluid, non-binary, cross-cultural identities that resist harmful inherited myths.
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