For more than a decade female Japanese artists have been a dynamic force in contemporary photography, and now they are making big waves in other artistic media as well, as the phantasmagoric work of Tomoko Konoike best illustrates.
I can think of few Japanese artists today who are more exciting than Konoike. Her signature multimedia installations juxtapose plastic toy daggers with quiet, hand-drawn monochrome anime of a figure she calls "Mimio," and gigantic multi-panel paintings of wolves devouring girls (these done up in a riot of super-saturated color). The installations sink their teeth into your throat and drag you into haunting and captivating neo-surrealist atmospheres. Nobody else is doing anything like this.
Born in Akita Prefecture, Konoike graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Art and Music in 1985, and emerged on the contemporary art scene some 10 years later. It has taken Konoike almost another decade to flourish, and only now has she begun to claim the respect she rightly deserves. Congratulations to her representatives at the Mizuma for supporting the development of an artist who was already about 40 in an era when gallerists routinely raid art schools, ever on the hunt for the next young thing -- a practice which sees more than a few artists dismissed as "burnt-out" before they hit 35.
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