The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 102 (above and opposite) Work 19 – G 2019 Screenprinted and hand-coloured ceramic and iron / 91 x 57 x 58cm / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2021 with funds from Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / Image courtesy: MEM, Tokyo Over her long career, Kimiyo Mishima has become one of Japan’s most widely exhibited female ceramic artists, noted for her wry humour and material sophistication. Her background, however, lies not in Japan’s justly honoured disciplines of craft and design but in the avant-garde, accompanied by a persistent fear of being buried in the ever-accumulating cast- offs of contemporary society. Mishima first came to prominence in Japan as a painter in the late 1950s and 1960s, collaging news and magazine clippings to oils on canvas as a play on the emerging consumer culture. A resident of the Kansai region, she was close to the celebrated avant-gardists of the Gutai Art Association and participated in their actions, but never formally joined, being disinclined to become a member of such a rigorously organised art group. In 1971, she turned to ceramics, crafting objects that re-create ordinary products such as newspapers, manga, strips of film and postboxes in ways that closely mimic the originals. Using screenprinting and hand-colouring, her ceramics quickly became refined to the point that she considered them replicas of the everyday. In APT10, Mishima presents a selection of works from across her career. These include some of her earliest ceramics (a cluster of paper shopping bags from 1973–74 bearing the warning ‘FRAGILE – handle with care’ across their crumpled surfaces). Accompanying these is a stack of 1960s single- colour handbills, buckling and folding like the cheap paper on which the originals would have been printed, replete with the strange rhetoric of cut-price advertising: outlandish terms like ‘recession busting’ and ‘fire sale’. This theme is continued with a group of fruit box works, in which utterly convincing branded packaging for Premium bananas, Derby Winner grapefruit and Propal oranges is stuffed with individually cast and detailed ceramic newsprint pages, as if the boxes have found a second life in the transport of crockery, or simply as bins for scrunched-up newspapers. The selection centres on two recent wastepaper works. Work 19 – G 2019 (G standing for ‘garbage’) features a mesh bin cast in iron and stuffed with ceramic objects that pass as cardboard boxes, intricately labelled as containers for a range of commodities, from soft drink and beer to fruit. It is complemented by Work 21 – C4 2021 (C standing for ‘cans’), which is full to the brim with enormously convincing ceramic renderings of 90 aluminium beverage cans, their colourful designs rendered in exquisite detail. For Mishima, waste is a sign of overproduction, of a society that generates more than it can sustainably process and certainly more than it needs. This extends to information, which is why Mishima tends to take as her subject matter sources of information that, while useful, are not highly valued, such as bill posters and temporary advertising. Significantly, her earliest ceramic works were reproductions of newspapers, where information is consumed as entertainment rather than knowledge, analogous to the cheap stock on which they are printed, mass-produced and so easily discarded. Ceramics, for Mishima, is a medium whose products are inherently breakable and, therefore, intuitively valuable. Accordingly, she describes her work with the paradoxical phrase ‘breakable printed matter’ — ‘throwaway’ objects whose beauty and material vulnerability implicitly recommend handling with care. There is a sense of absurdism at work in Mishima’s formulation, a satirical edge that courses through even her early paintings, and which is highly visible on the gleaming surfaces of her boxes, cans, cheap photostats and paper bags. Where the greater absurdity lies — in the carefully crafted, deliberately comical replicas of consumer detritus, or in a world that, through its throwaway mentality, cannot help but hasten its own demise, symbolised in Mishima’s imagination by great mountains of junk that might consume us all — is open to question. Reuben Keehan Kimiyo Mishima Born 1932, Osaka, Japan Lives and works in Osaka and Gifu, Japan