Mika Ninagawa: Goldfish

The only English-language monograph on one of Japan’s most influential contemporary artists, Mika Ninagawa, presenting presenting the dazzling, dream-like world of her photography, installation and film. Emerging from Onnanoko shashin, the Japanese ‘girly photography’ movement of the late 1990s, Mika Ninagawa’s navigation of the once male-dominated photographic field in Japan has led to her rise as a cultural phenomenon in her native country, her work spanning art, cinema, fashion and advertising. Mika Ninagawa: Goldfish is the first accessible, up-to-date English-language overview of Ninagawa’s practice, placing photography at its core while addressing her sometimes overlooked but influential film and installation work. Ninagawa transforms the iconography of popular culture and kitsch into a complex artistic language shaped by tensions between life and death, control and freedom, surface and depth. Including conversations between Lena Fritsch, Ninagawa and her collaborators, and with an essay by Professor Jennifer Coates, this book is a compelling study of one of the great image makers in Japan today.