Japanese ceramic newspaper sculptor Kimiyo Mishima dies at 91

Kimiyo Mishima, the Japanese artist whose ceramic newspaper sculptures began to attract international attention, has died, The New York Times reports. Japanese NewsShe was 91 years old.

Mishima, who originally trained as a painter, began creating newspaper sculptures in the 1970s. She later began making ceramic works that resemble wastebaskets, containing crumpled paper, boxes, etc., that are so realistic that they are not immediately distinguishable as elements of art.

With these works, she says, she depicts “fragile printed materials,” effectively making permanent versions of items that can easily be recycled or thrown away.

“My work is a record of everyday life,” she once said. “It embodies modernity.”

Born in Osaka in 1932, Mishima began painting as a teenager after the war ended and witnessed the devastation of World War II firsthand. She recalled entering a bomb shelter and leaving to find the city she lived in destroyed.

After graduating from high school in 1951, she joined the art space Atelier Montagne Youga Kenkyusho the following year. The space was run by the artist Shigeji Mishima, whom she eventually married. Through him, Mishima met the likes of Jiro Yoshihara, founder of the Gutai avant-garde, and while she never became a formal member of the group, she incorporated the Gutai artists’ love of everyday life into her art.

Mishima began as a figurative painter, but by the late 1960s she had turned to abstraction. In the 1960s she began using magazine pages and other printed materials in her paintings, a move that aligned her with American artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

The material sometimes has an overtly political content: Clip 2 (1965), a work in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, shows images of Vietnamese people fleeing their village. But Mishima said she was more interested in the look of the images than their content. She once explained that she was primarily concerned with “the fear and anxiety that is drowning in information.”

In 1970, Mishima, struck by the amount of newspapers being thrown away, began making sculptures out of folded and crumpled prints. The sculptures gradually grew larger, and eventually she began making three-dimensional ceramic works that depicted piles of newspapers, magazines, and flyers, bundled as if they were being thrown out for recycling.

Empty, crushed coke and beer cans and broken boxes also appear in ceramic form in her work, reflecting the impact of capitalism on postwar Japan and the wider human waste.

Although most of her exhibitions have taken place in Japan, Mishima’s work has recently attracted an international audience, with solo shows at Taka Ishii Gallery in New York and Nonaka-Hill Gallery in Los Angeles over the past decade.

“Dear Kimiyo Mishima, you lived such a full life, with a tireless creativity and curiosity that gave us all ‘another energy,’ ” wrote curator Mami Kataoka, who included Mishima’s work in a 2021 group exhibition of female artists at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. “I was honored to work with you for the last five years of your 91 years.”