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.