The unsettling still lifes and self-portraits of Michiko Kon are representative of several important cultural shifts that were fully entrenched in Japan by the end of the 1980s. It was during this period that photography, which, outside avant‑garde circles, had been regarded as a representational practice somewhat removed from the mainstream, came to be encompassed within contemporary art’s discursive field and market base. In the context of Japanese society, the rise of individualism in an exploding consumer culture coincided with a shift away from participation in photographic societies or cohesive groups toward an emphasis on individual practice.¹ Finally, the empowerment of women artists both through the cho-shojo (supergirls) phenomenon and in reaction to its constraints enabled the advancement of feminist positions. If these were not always overt, they suggested the possibility of aesthetic, intellectual and narrative constructs that were more complicated than those made by their male counterparts.

Like other members of her generation, including Yasumasa Morimura and Tokihiro Sato, Kon came to photography from a technically distinct artistic discipline, and her training in printmaking, collage and assemblage is evident in her richly toned black-and-white photographs of intricate sculptural tableaux. Kon’s work is characterised by its sumptuous juxtapositions of organic and inorganic material, drawing on a range of art historical precedents, from seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes to surrealist incongruities of the 1910s and 1920s, to present dreamlike associations of everyday objects with insects, flowers and Kon’s pictorial signature — fish. In Self portrait #3 1989, Kon appears provocatively and partially obscured — a common characteristic of all her self-portraits of the period — with a piscine hairpiece and matching fish head on the tip of each finger of her hand. In High heel of salmon and flatfish 1987, a woman’s shoe is clad entirely in scales, with a fish tail shooting up from the counter like an elaborate bootstrap and a chrysanthemum garnishing the vamp.²

Reciting from a catalogue of symbolic associations is unavoidable when considering Kon’s work. The chrysanthemum alone is a powerful motif in Japanese society — a cipher for both funerary lamentation and fidelity to empire — although it is not even the dominant symbol at work here. For Kon, fish are fascinating for their inherent ‘proximity of life and death’,³ and it is difficult not to consider the material precariousness of clothing or body adornment hewn from such a delicate substance as scales, analogous to the fleeting existence of creatures so central to food consumption in Japan. For all the absurdity of their juxtaposition, seafood and the domestic everyday are alike in their otherness to conventional masculinity — signs of the feminine, the corporeal, the alien, the effete.

So complex is Michiko Kon’s symbolic palette that it is impossible to reduce her images to a single reading. They are not a set of clues to be deciphered, but a density of psychological charges assembled in true surrealist spirit — they do not so much express as induce. ‘I want the viewer to enter into the image’; the artist has declared: ‘My pictures cannot be misunderstood’.⁴

Endnotes

1. Dana Friis-Hansen, ‘Internationalization, individualism and the institutionalization of photography’, in Anne Wilkes Tucker, Dana Friis-Hansen, Kaneko Ryuichi and Takeba Joe, The History of Japanese Photography [exhibition catalogue], Yale University Press in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, West Haven, 2003, p.262.
2. The counter is the piece of material forming the back of a shoe or boot round the heel, while the vamp is the front part of the upper of a shoe.
3. Luisa Orto and Matsuda Takako, ‘Artist profiles’, in Anne Wilkes Tucker et. al., p.349.
4. Quoted in Anne Wilkes Tucker et. al., p.275.