Kimiyo Mishima, Japanese Sculptor of Ceramic Newspapers, Dies at 91

Kimiyo Mishima, a Japanese artist whose ceramic sculptures of newspapers that have begun to gain an international audience, has died, according to the Japan News. She was 91.

Having initially begun as a painter, Mishima started producing her newspaper sculptures in the 1970s. Later, she would make ceramic pieces resembling waste baskets containing balled-up papers, boxes, and more, rendering them with such realism that they did not immediately distinguish themselves as elements of an artwork.

With these works, she said she had depicted “breakable printed materials,” effectively making permanent versions of objects that could easily be recycled or tossed out.

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

Mishima was born in 1932 in Osaka and turned to painting as a teenager after the conclusion of World War II, whose destruction she witnessed firsthand. She recalled one experience of entering an air raid shelter, then leaving it to find that the city she called home had been destroyed.

After she graduated high school in 1951, she joined the art space Atelier Montagne Youga Kenkyusho the following year. The space was run by artist Shigeji Mishima, whom she would ultimately marry. Through him, Mishima met figures such as Jiro Yoshihara, a founder of the Gutai avant-garde, and while she never became an official Gutai member, she absorbed its artists’ love of luring everyday life into the field of art.

Mishima started out as a figurative painter, but by the end of the decade, she had turned to abstraction. During the 1960s, she began to enlist magazine pages and other printed matter in her paintings, a move that aligned her with American artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

These materials sometimes contained overt political matter: Fragment II (1965), a work owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, features images of Vietnamese people fleeing their villages. But Mishima stated she was more interested in the look of these pictures than their content. She was primarily invested in the “fear and anxiety of drowning in information,” she once explained.

In 1970, alarmed by the amount of newspapers that were being thrown away, Mishima began making sculptures of folded and crumpled printed matter. The sculptures gradually grew larger, and eventually, she began making three-dimensional ceramic works depicting stacks of newspapers, magazines, and flyers that were bound up, as though they had been put out for recycling.

Emptied and crushed Coke and beer cans and torn boxes would also appear in her work as ceramics, a reflection both of the impact of capitalism on postwar Japan and the wastefulness of humanity more broadly.

Though most of her shows were staged in Japan, Mishima’s work has more recently gained an international audience, with solo exhibitions staged at Taka Ishii Gallery in New York and Nonaka-Hill gallery in Los Angeles in the past decade.

“Dear Kimiyo Mishima, you have lived so well with tireless creativity and curiosity, which gave all of us ‘another energy’,” wrote curator Mami Kataoka, who included Mishima’s art in a 2021 group show of women artists at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. “It was a great honor for me to work with you during the last five years of your 91 years of life.”