Kimiyo Mishima: FRAGILE

Nonaka-Hill Los Angeles is honored to present the works of Kimiyo Mishima in her second exhibition with the gallery. FRAGILE will be on view from April 25 through June 6.

Kimiyo Mishima felt revulsion toward a culture of temporary fulfillment—newspapers once read instantly became useless, and vending machine beverage cans were purchased, their contents consumed, and the cans immediately discarded. She strove, through her seven-decade career, to convey the fragile state of the environment, and her fear of being buried in infinite information and detritus.

Mishima abandoned painting around 1970, having become conceptually and metaphorically attracted to the medium of ceramics, because it can break. She replicated single-use consumer items by flattening clay into thin sheets, silkscreening and hand-painting the daily news and commercial graphics that beguiled her.

Focusing on ceramic sculpture and grand-scale multimedia installations, she often utilized newspaper pages featuring stories about current politics, art exhibitions, music or theatrical events, or celebrities and fashions of the moment. Mishima remained attuned to societal change and continually experimented with her work, perfecting her techniques while also incorporating materials that evoked the passage of time. These collected moments of her life stand as a diary that continued to grow in breadth until shortly before she died in the fall of 2024.

Nonaka-Hill opened in 2018 with an inaugural exhibition of 1960s paintings by Kimiyo Mishima, complemented by photographs from Shomei Tomatsu’s Plastics series. Both artists were children during WWII, but went on to achieve careers spanning more than seven decades, creating essential expressions within Japan’s postwar art history. This second exhibition spans various points in Mishima’s life, marking her as a pioneer of Pop Art and conceptual ceramics in Japan and worldwide.