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February 15, 2008 > Arts & Entertainment > Yanagi photo exhibit makes colorful commentary

Yanagi photo exhibit makes colorful commentary

By Lolley McConnell | For the Thresher

Miwa Yanagi’s diverse new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston integrates theatrical elements with cutting edge techniques to render visually charming photographs.

Yanagi, a former performance artist, was selected as Deutsche Bank’s 2004 “Artist of the Business Year.” Her exhibition, which started in Berlin several years ago, has grown into three bodies of work. The show spans from highly manipulated, contemporary color works to darker, more traditional prints. Although visually diverse, the three works share the underlying theme of women’s struggle within society.

The first piece,”Elevator Girls,” comments on this social phenomenon: In Japan, department stores hire young women to operate their elevators. These women are chosen both on the basis of their pleasing physical appearance, necessarily light-skinned and small-framed, as well as their willingness to carry out management’s orders. They are required to wear matching uniforms and even memorize lines that they repeat verbatim for hours on end to hordes of shoppers with matching expressions of disinterest.

The backgrounds are sterile public spaces and are almost always presented in mirror images, as if no matter where one of Yanagi’s women would turn, they could never escape the sameness of themselves and their environment. The photos comment on the current perception of women: the idea that they should all strive for the same ideal of beauty.

In contrast to the highly colorful and modern “Elevator Girls,” the prints in “Fairy Tale” are done entirely in black and white and draw on legends that the Western world is familiar with. Among the old favorites like Hansel and Gretel, Yanagi interjects two tales from this century.

One is Kobo Abe’s “The Woman in the Dunes,” a story that Yanagi uses as the basis for a video which is one of only two works in the series that are not a large-scale photograph. The models of the video — all of whom are between 10 and 12 years old — depict women of all ages, as Yanagi uses masks to represent the elderly.

However, with young limbs often sticking out of the costumes, there is some ambiguity with regards to the characters’ ages. The older women of these stories act as either the villain or the guide while almost always the young portray the protagonist in this series. Since we can never ascribe any definite age to Yanagi’s characters, we are forced to look at the tales more closely and examine what roles maturity and innocence represent.

The third series, “My Grandmothers” is a project that Yanagi says “visualizes the self-perceived notions of several young women when asked to imagine what type of women they themselves might become 50 years later.” The photos resemble “Elevator Girls” with their vibrant, unnatural color schemes, where the typical graying hair of a woman is instead bright pink or neon blue.

In “Hiroko,” a young porn star is lectured by her grandmother figure against the backdrop of a messy hotel room. The actress’s suitcase is open in the middle of the floor and spews clothes along with an S&M gag. By tackling the porn industry, an area in which women often lack individual identity, Yanagi clarifies that even in this situation a woman must gain strength from her predecessors and respect what they have done in the past.

Yanagi’s commentary about the role of women evolves throughout the works. The very criticism that is present in “Elevator Girls,” gradually softens and becomes less evident in “Fairy Tale,” requiring a closer look at some of the stories that many of us have heard since childhood. “My Grandmothers” challenges us to look forward, to where women will be 50 years from now, and serves to remind us how far our predecessors have came.

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