Born 1932, Osaka, Japan
Lives and works in Osaka

Over a long career, ceramic artist Kimiyo Mishima has been noted for her wry humour and material sophistication. She first came to prominence in Japan as a painter in the late 1950s and 1960s. In 1971, however, she turned to ceramics, crafting objects that recreate ordinary products — such as newspapers, manga, strips of film and postboxes — to closely mimic the originals. Using screenprinting and hand-colouring, her ceramics quickly became refined to the point that she considers her works as replicas of the everyday.

To the artist, ceramics are inherently breakable and therefore intuitively valuable. Mishima describes her works as ‘breakable printed matter’ — ‘throwaway’ objects whose beauty and material vulnerability implicitly suggest that they be handled with care, in contrast to the environmentally destructive disposability of the actual subject matter. For APT10, Mishima presents a cross-career selection of ceramics, from early 1970s renderings of shopping bags through to recycling bins full of highly realistic-looking aluminium cans and cardboard packaging.

_{Supported by the Australia-Japan Foundation of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Ishibashi Foundation and the Japan Foundation.}