Fairy Tales by Miwa Yanagi

Found this article last week: Breaking fairy-tale conventions of beauty by Matthew Larkin and had to learn more, of course, about the Fairy Tale series by Miwa Yanagi mentioned. The Fairy Tale collection is featured here with English titles in its entirety, but of course, I had to share some of the images here, too. Follow the link to see the images in larger scale. Clicking on the images in this post will also take you to larger versions. See if you can identify what fairy tales are represented since I am not including titles.


Here are two paragraphs from the article, explaining Yanagi's inspiration and work but you can learn more at Yanagi's website. It helps if you read Japanese!

Against the tradition of bijinga (beautiful women pictures) that runs through Japanese art, there is an antithetical stream that draws attention to a grotesque and timeworn femininity. In noh plays, the celebrated early 9th-century beauty of the Heian Era, Ono no Komachi, is sometimes portrayed after her looks have faded and she has become an elderly beggar. During the Edo Period (1603-1867), there was the popular theme of Yamauba, a wild witch living the mountains. In the 20th century, the tradition continued with the paintings of ghoulish geisha from artists Shinso Okamoto and Chusei Inagaki.

The apparent contemporary to these precedents, Miwa Yanagi (b. 1967), is showing her "Windswept Women: The Old Girls' Troupe" series of photos concurrently at the National Museum of Art, Osaka (her first solo show in west Japan in seven years), and at the Venice Biennale. Yanagi started receiving critical acclaim from the mid-'90s for her work addressing Japanese feminine stereotypes, and now, as one of Japan's artistic representatives on the international stage, she is garnering further attention with her more mythic gestures. Her "Po-po Nyangnyang" exhibition at the National Museum of Art also includes works from two other series, "Fairy Tale" (2004-06) and ongoing "My Grandmothers."

Some of the images are quite disturbing--those masks!--but I also love that she interpreted lesser known tales such as Brother and Sister, Frau Trude and others.