KON Michiko
(Japan 1955– )
- Title
- Boot of shrimps
- Other titles:
- Boots of shrimps
- Place of origin
-
Japan
- Period
- Heisei period 1989 - → Japan
- Year
- 1995
- Media category
- Photograph
- Materials used
- gelatin silver photograph
- Edition
- 12/75
- Dimensions
-
51.1 x 41.3cm image; 60.7 x 50.8cm sheet
- Signature & date
- Signed l.r. verso, pencil "Michiko Kon". Dated l.l. verso, pencil "1995".
- Credit
- Purchased 1995
- Accession number
- 205.1995
- Copyright
- © KON Michiko
- Location
- Not on display
- Further information
Kon is one of the leading contemporary photographers in Japan, whose idiosyncratic images combine the familiar shapes of everyday objects with the unfamiliar textures of raw food. The surreal images she thus creates not only break a taboo (of playing with food) but take the viewer into a realm of fantasy. Kon began photography as part of her training in printmaking at Tokyo's Sôkei School of Art, from which she graduated in 1978. By the 1980s she was exhibiting widely in Japan, Europe and the United States, and was awarded the prestigious Kimura Ihee Award in 1991. Concerning the 'texture' of her work, Kon recounts an incident on a train when she saw a properly dressed teenage girl suddenly and quite naturally begin licking the metal lock on the train window. Kon relates this bizarre behaviour to her own desire to capture the uncommon, the peculiar and the disconcerting in her photographs.
Art Gallery Handbook, 1999. pg. 285.
- Bibliography (5)
-
'The familiar made strange' by Jane Somerville, Look May 2007, May 2007, 20 (illus.).
Judy Annear (Australia) (Author), The Enigmatic Object, Sydney, 1997.
Bruce James (Australia) (Author), Edmund Capon (England; Australia, b.1940) (Director), Art Gallery of New South Wales handbook, Domain, 1999, 285 (colour illus.).
'Photography', The Asian Collections Art Gallery of New South Wales 2003, 2003, 293 (illus.).
Art speaks Japanese: Japanese language education kit from the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales 2007, 2007, colour illus.. card no. 16
- Exhibition history (1)
-
The Enigmatic Object, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 15 Apr 1997–22 Jun 1997.
