In Self portrait #3 Michiko Kon presents herself as photographer with props, adding the 'signature' part of fish to her hair and on one hand to her fingers.
Michiko Kon’s training in printmaking, collage and assemblage is evident in her richly toned black-and-white photographs of intricate sculptural tableaux. Characterised by sumptuous combinations of organic and inorganic material, and drawing on a range of art historical precedents — from seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes to surrealist works of the 1910s and 1920s — Kon creates dreamlike associations of everyday objects using insects, flowers, and her pictorial signature, fish. For Kon, fish are fascinating for their inherent ‘proximity of life and death’: the fragility of clothing or body adornment made from such a delicate substance explores the fleeting existence of a creature so central to nutrition and culinary culture in Japan. For all the absurdity of their juxtaposition, seafood and women’s apparel are alike in their challenge to conventional masculinity: they represent the feminine, the corporeal and the alien.