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Details
- Other Title
- Boots of shrimps
- Place where the work was made
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Japan
- Period
- Heisei period 1989 - → Japan
- Date
- 1995
- Media category
- Photograph
- Materials used
- gelatin silver photograph
- Edition
- 12/75
- Dimensions
- 51.1 x 41.3 cm image; 60.7 x 50.8 cm sheet
- Signature & date
Signed l.r. verso, pencil "Michiko Kon". Dated l.l. verso, pencil "1995".
- Credit
- Purchased 1995
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 205.1995
- Copyright
- © KON Michiko
- Artist information
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Michiko Kon
Works in the collection
- Share
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About
Kon is one of the leading contemporary photographers in Japan, whose idiosyncratic images combine the familiar shapes of everyday objects with the unfamiliar textures of raw food. The surreal images she thus creates not only break a taboo (of playing with food) but take the viewer into a realm of fantasy. Kon began photography as part of her training in printmaking at Tokyo's Sôkei School of Art, from which she graduated in 1978. By the 1980s she was exhibiting widely in Japan, Europe and the United States, and was awarded the prestigious Kimura Ihee Award in 1991. Concerning the 'texture' of her work, Kon recounts an incident on a train when she saw a properly dressed teenage girl suddenly and quite naturally begin licking the metal lock on the train window. Kon relates this bizarre behaviour to her own desire to capture the uncommon, the peculiar and the disconcerting in her photographs.
Art Gallery Handbook, 1999. pg. 285.
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Places
Where the work was made
Japan
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Exhibition history
Shown in 2 exhibitions
The Enigmatic Object, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 Apr 1997–22 Jun 1997
In one drop of water, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 Jun 2019–21 Feb 2021
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Bibliography
Referenced in 5 publications
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Judy Annear, The Enigmatic Object, Sydney, 1997.
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Bruce James, Art Gallery of New South Wales handbook, 'Asian Collection: East Asia', pg. 246-287, Sydney, 1999, 285 (colour illus.).
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Jackie Menzies (Editor), The Asian Collections Art Gallery of New South Wales, 'Photography', Sydney, 2003, 293 (illus.).
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Public Programmes Department, Art Gallery of New South Wales and The Japan Foundation (Editors), Art speaks Japanese: Japanese language education kit from the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, colour illus.. card no. 16
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Jane Somerville, Look, 'The familiar made strange', Sydney, May 2007, 20 (illus.).
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