Kimiyo Mishima

Kimiyo Mishima (1932–2024) was a Japanese contemporary artist renowned for her innovative ceramic sculptures that replicate "breakable printed matter" such as newspapers, magazines, comic books, and packaging, transforming ephemeral objects into enduring monuments. Born in the Juso district of Osaka, Japan, in 1932, Mishima grew up during World War II, an experience that profoundly shaped her artistic perspective. Emerging from an air raid shelter to find her city devastated by American bombs, she carried a lasting impression of material and informational chaos, which became a central theme in her work.

Mishima began her artistic journey as a painter in her teens, initially creating figurative works before transitioning to abstraction in the 1950s under the influence of her husband, Shigeji Mishima, a painter connected to the Gutai movement. She joined the Atelier Montagne art school, where she was exposed to avant-garde ideas and interacted with artists like Jiro Yoshihara, though she declined to join Gutai, preferring to work independently. In the 1960s, she incorporated collage into her paintings, using newspapers, magazines, and discarded printed materials, reflecting her concerns about information overload and consumerism.

In 1971, Mishima shifted to ceramics, pioneering a technique to silkscreen newspaper and advertisement images onto clay, creating hyper-realistic sculptures that captured the texture and form of crumpled papers or packaging. Inspired by an udon-making demonstration, she used a rolling pin to achieve the thinness needed for her ceramic newspapers. Her works, such as Newspaper-F-82 (1982) and Box Banana 16 (2015), critique mass media and wastefulness while drawing parallels to American Pop Art and Japanese collectives like Gutai and Dokuritsu Art Association. Mishima’s sculptures, often large-scale, have been exhibited globally, earning her recognition as one of Japan’s most prominent female sculptural ceramists.

Mishima’s work is held in prestigious collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art. She continued creating until her passing on June 19, 2024, at age 91, leaving a legacy of art that challenges viewers to reconsider the permanence of everyday objects and the environmental impact of consumption.