Michiko Kon was born in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan in 1955. She graduated from the Sokei Art School in 1978 and for the next two years attended the Tokyo Photographic College. Kon's photographs have been exhibited internationally: in 2000, her first major solo exhibition was staged at the San Jose Museum of Art, California, and in 2003 Kon was included in the group show 'Beyond the surface – Japanese style of making things' at the Singapore Art Museum.

Kon's eccentric still life assemblages take everyday objects, like a hat or a shoe, and 'clothe' them with the scales, heads and tails of fish. The fish remnants employed in surreal imagery are comical, yet they may also have a relationship to the Christian doctrine as a symbol of the saviour rendered as a martyr: food, in the form of fish and crustaceans, is predominantly used as a decorative medium. Kon says: 

What I love to do is create an unrealistic situation through this totally realistic method which tolerates vagueness. I do not want an audience to grasp an object with dull, insensitive and conventional eyes.¹

Endnote

1. Michiko Kon, 'Michiko Kon' in Beyond the photographic frame: 11 recent works, Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki, 1990, p.25.