2009 was a greatly meaningful year for the artist, Miwa Yanagi.  Starting with the solo exhibition My Grandmothers in Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in March, she presented a total of three solo exhibitions in 2009. In June, she presented her new works Windswept Women at the Japanese Pavilion in the 53rd Venice Biennale and in the same month presented Po-po Niang-niang! at the National Museum of Art, Osaka.  Windswept Women highlighted how the dramatic impression, which had been contained in Yanagi’s photographic works could be physically realized in an installation. She covered the whole Japanese Pavilion with a huge tent and inside placed a small half-broken tent with a child-size entrance, for her video art works The Old Girl’s Troupe. Synchronized with those two tents, giant framed portraits confused viewers’ sense of scale. 
 
Lullaby, Yanagi’s brand-new video art work is to be released at the Rat Hole Gallery.  In this work, appear women in two different generations – very old and very young, this is the return of a motif the artist has previously explored.  In a closed room, an old lady and a young girl tangle each other in a state between conflict and assimilation, and as the process goes on, the closed room changes its form and breaks down.  This work, having not a little to do with the artist’s Windswept Women, clearly shows dramatic confrontation of two bodies and the insignificance of house and family connections.  These two women are not representatives of each generation but ambivalent entities, which are to shake our fixed concepts of values
toward women.
 
In many of Yanagi’s video art works including Kagome, Kagome (1998), Granddaughters (2002), Suna Shojyo (2004), Suna Onna (2005), Fortune Telling (2005), and The Old Girl’s Troupe (2009), reality and imagination mix and it seems ordained that the tales will unrelentingly continue although the stories have beginnings and endings.  Like the real world has no ending, women in Yanagi’s works, which can be alter egos for viewers, never have their endings and have strength to bear repetitions of their everyday small creation and destruction.

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Kyoto-based photographer Miwa Yanagi is known for her series of images that examine actual and mythical female identities. Her heroines are devoid of commonplace anxiety of time-triggered decay; they only gain from aging that brings the long-sought liberation from their circumscribed societal roles. Yanagi's 2009 cycle of digital photographs "Windswept Women" was chosen to represent Japan at the 53rd Venice Biennale and generated quite a range of critical reactions. Last year she was also exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and at the National Museum of Art in Osaka. Her latest work is now on view at the Rat Hole Gallery gallery in Omotesando. The centerpiece of the eponymous show—a twelve-minute video "Lullaby" is in a dialogue with several of the artist's silver gelatin prints from the fairy tale series of 2004–2006.

Introductory comments on blogspot by Julia Friedman