LIEKO SHIGA

While studying in London, where she received a BA from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2004, Lieko Shiga began her photographic series ‘Lilly’ (2002–2005). For the series, Shiga captured her neighbours at the time in a style reminiscent of paranormal photographs. In Bethany (2005), a young girl opens her cardigan, revealing nothing but a void. Dramatic lighting accentuates the sense of the uncanny, falling vertically on her body and leaving the rest of the image in darkness.

Photographed across Brisbane, Singapore, and Japan, ‘Canary’ (2007) shows Lieko Shiga’s signature dream-like imagery, realised through questionnaires in which she would ask residents about their relationships to the places they lived and then photograph the place, sensitive to their responses. In Restaurant Surtaj (2007), an otherwise ordinary restaurant scene attains an eerie touch through the presence of a woman whose face is immersed in a black cloud.

In 2008, Lieko Shiga received the prestigious Kimura Ihei Photography Award for her photography books Lilly and Canary. That year, she moved to Kitakama in Miyagi prefecture, becoming the small town’s official photographer. After the 2011 tsunami, Shiga gathered surviving photographs—both hers and the residents’—and developed them into the ‘RASEN KAIGAN (Spiral Coast)’ (2008–2012): a record of the history of and life in Kitakama.

Also emerging from Lieko Shiga’s relationship with Kitakama is ‘Human Spring’ (2018–2019), which contemplates death and other modes of transition. The artist was inspired in part by a series of health issues and deaths that surrounded her at the time: a Kitakama farmer became manic every spring after all his crops died suddenly; Shiga was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism; and suicides occurred at the evacuation centre following the earthquake.

While photographing ‘Human Spring’, Lieko Shiga chose to place herself in unfamiliar situations, capturing locations such as Fukushima prefecture in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster. She received the 2017 Prix Pictet Japan Award for ‘Blind Date’ (2017): a series of black-and-white photographs that close up on couples on motorbikes in Bangkok. In 2021, she was awarded the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award for a practice that ‘condenses important elements for reflecting on the society in which we find ourselves’.

Lieko Shiga Solo Exhibitions include:

Human Spring, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (2019); Blind Date, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2017); CANARY, Foam, Amsterdam (2013); RASENKAIGAN, Sendai Mediatheque, Japan (2012); CANARY, PRISKA PASQUER, Cologne (2011).

Lieko Shiga Group Exhibitions include:

5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Russia (2019); 2 or 3 Tigers, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017); Japanorama, A new vision on art since 1970, Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2017); Japanese Photography from Postwar to Now, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2016); Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015); In the Wake / Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015).

Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021