Well-respected female photographer, Miyako Ishiuchi, who was selected by Commissioner Michiko Kasahara to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale this year, has revealed her plans for the show.
Ishiuchi will present her new “Mother’s” series, a group of photographs documenting her mother, an apparently stong-willed woman who lived through tumultuous times stretching from life in colonial Manchuria in the 1930s to wartime Japan where she worked as a truck driver. Ishiuchi’s tribute will start with a photograph of her mother, but will consist mostly of “portraits” of her clothing and possessions: chemises, combs and other personal effects. It promises to be a deeply personal, unassuming installation.
(source: Japanese Art Scene Monitor )

The series “Mother” is exhibited at Third Gallery Aya (Jp.) in Osaka from today on until February 19. Third Gallery Aya is a very good place IMHO which had a lot of interesting shows over the years.

I am really looking forward to see the “Mother” series in Venice!
Besides this new work and her fantastic first book “Yokosuka Story”, which is already included in the recently published histories of photo books, Ishiuchi’s book “1 9 4 7” is another of my favourites. In the book Ishiuchi depicts women born in 1947, the same year she was born. But the book only shows the hands and the feets of the women and the delicate photographs tempt the viewer to read much more into the surface of the skin as actually is visible.

Miyako Ishiuchi (*1947) was born in Gunma prefecture and raised in Yokosuka. She studied textile design in the design department of Tama Art University, but left before obtaining a degree. She first became known with “Yokosuka Story” in 1977 and “Apartment” the following year, then won the Fourth Kimura Ihei Prize for photography in 1979 and the Eleventh Shashin no Kai Prize (Photography Association Prize) and Fifteenth Higashigawa Prize for Japanese Artists in 1999. Major works include “1 9 4 7”, “Hands, Legs, Flesh, Body” (photographs of the poet Ito Hiromi) in 1995, “1906 to the skin” (photographs of the Butoh Dancer Kazuo Ono) and “Chromosome XY” (close-up photographs of the male body) in 1995, and “Mothers” (documentary photographs of objects belonging to the artists mother) in 2002 and Kizuato (studies of cuts on a body) in 2004. Lives and works in Tokyo.
(source: Japan Foundation)