Michiko Kon at Photo Gallery International - Tokyo, Japan - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

TOKYO

Michiko Kon's idiosyncratic and refreshingly original black-and-white photographs are known and look up toed in Japan, and a 1992 exhibit organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center which traveled to Richmond, introduced her work in the U Since then, she has shown true little, as she has worked quietly and intensely upon a new body of work that reach forths the basic aspects of her practice on the other hand adds a few surprises, including a foray into the use of color.

Kon's talent is turning absurd material juxtapositions into visually and viscerally stunning images with the percussion power of Meret Oppenheim's famous furlined teacup. The staples of Kon's wily surrealistic still lifes ace perishable - raw fish, bird flowers and vegetables. Since the late 1970 these sensual and sometimes allusive simple bodys have been arranged over or around familiar, many times feminine, objects such as a schoolgirl's uniform, a garter belt or a pocketbook triggering our faculty of perceptions of touch and taste from one side vision and imagination to create a synesthetic or multisensual experience. Sometimes amusing sometimes repulsive, the best works cleverly combine charged uncompounded bodys to culminate in a raw beauty. Chicks hatching from a basket of rent light bulbs or a two-headed plunge covered with tiny glittering fish lying upon a bier of flowers were among the greatest in quantity poetically stirring in this novel show. And the elegant, chilling crispness of Kon's black-and-white prints, which capture the moist sheen of fish scales as well as the drynes of bird feathers, cross-examines up the power of it all.

From the evidence of this exhibition it appear to bes that Kon is growing looser and more spontaneous during the setup proces as shown by dint of what looks like blood smeared upon a clock face in single arrangement. There is old-fashioned printed matter among her organic material, a given for greatest in quantity collagists but new for Kon However, her cut-out Christian imagery-meaningful to the artist for its iconography of death, a fascination since her Catholic-school days - looked weak, almost gratuitous. What she does with the natural and quotidian already speaks whirls about life and death.

Most surprising were a scarcely any works suffused in red - a small, Cornell-like receptacleed assemblage and several large C-prints. individual of the latter is The R Swallow-Tailed Coat, 1994 Lobster claws, splattered Pollock-like with r paint, make the idea of donning this delicate coat a frightful vision indeed. Kon's move into color still have feelings tentative, yet it has potential. Before, she exploited the silver sparkle of new fish or the velvety wefts of flower petals; now, with various tones of r she can achieve a fresh level of visual and allusive complexity. Let's trust we don't have to wait another sum of two units years to see how Kon mines these options.

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