Masako Miki, Midnight March, ICA San Francisco
By: Hugh Leeman
Masako Miki's show, Midnight March, at San Francisco's Institute of Contemporary Art, transports the viewer into a mythological realm that connects a deep folkloric past with contemporary social circumstances asking the viewer to question the stories society is built upon.
The artist's brightly colored, rounded sculptural forms made from densely matted felt, supported by tiny wooden legs within the ICA's dimly lit basement, backdropped by black walls of a stylized star-crowded night sky, transform the banality of the basement into a place where a distracted society can begin to gain a new angle on the shadows cast across the social landscape.
In addition to the felt sculptures, the artist shows three paintings on paper and three small bronze sculptures. The ICA's new location was formerly the Bank of America's flagship San Francisco branch, with the small bronze sculptures appearing alongside empty lockboxes of former bank customers.
The artist is at her best with the three dimensional felted sculptures, which draw from her Japanese heritage, inspired by Japan's oldest religion, Shinto, and its supernatural beings known as yōkai. While viewers who follow Miki's work will see images they are familiar with from previous shows in the three paintings that pull from Shinto folklore, like her cheerfully stylized fox, it is the felted yōkai sculptures that are the central theme at the ICA and so prevalent one feels that we inhabit their space as opposed to the other way around.
To enter Midnight March, the viewer descends a staircase aside a wooden terraced forum. One can imagine the terraced forum allowed the seated, when still a bank, to take in corporate talking heads giving presentations on interest rates. For Midnight March, viewers are presented with an entirely different perspective as one can look down past the seating and steps into what used to be the bowels of the bank at a half lit world of Miki's furniture sized felt sculptures. After the viewer walks down the steps, they enter a fantastical space populated by the artist's brightly colored, mostly ambiguous entities, giving the sense that they are encountering a visual representation of what 20th-century author Joseph Campbell referred to as the poetry of metaphor in mythology.
The yōkai's role in millennia-old Japanese folklore ranges from malevolent to benevolent spirit-like forces understood to inhabit nature's awe-inspiring landscapes, from mountains, waterfalls, and forests to the commonplace corners of a dark closet. Whatever the intentions and location may be with each yōkai, they come out at night or the times between the changing of light when day breaks to dusk, acting as warning signs or simply inciting fear. Despite the foreboding nature of their appearance in Shinto belief, Miki has recreated them as cute, soft characters that seemingly challenge perceptions of their power.
As the show title, Midnight March implies, it is the darkest hour of night when, according to the Japanese folkloric tale famous for its yōkai spirits, Hyakki Yakō, the supernatural breaks into the real world. The yōkai's midnight march from Japan's Hyakki Yakō and into the ICA traces its way through a rich tradition of stories deeply woven into the Japanese landscape and loosely understood as a manifestation of pandemonium.
The show becomes a fitting first site responsive exhibition for the newly relocated ICA as the ancient mythological spirit world the artist has created in rainbows of colored felt break into our real world through the darkened ICA basement once stacked with the real world of bank lock boxes and filing cabinets of financial spreadsheets. The timely exhibit speaks through metaphors that pull from the past and connect to today's society, deeply searching through the fabric of its cultural history amidst what seems to be an era enmeshed in a pandemonium populated by forces inciting fear and warning of what could come or already is.
Dozens of Miki's colorful yōkai sculptures sitting throughout all parts of the subterranean space allow viewers to come face to face with some as tall as 6 feet while others barely reach the knee. Yet, save the rare pair of closed eyes or lips that hang from the ceiling, the forms are largely unfamiliar, allowing the viewer to experience the potential of myth to pull us from time and place and situate us in the collective unconscious.
Miki's installation of the felted yōkai sculptures compels us to an internal place of pondering rather than paving the way for escape. Entirely unlike the escape of dopamine drenched infinite scroll rabbit holes of internet culture that can spread pandemonium, in Midnight March, we are taken to a place that has existed all along yet is often forgotten. A place where cultural myths, when questioned, often become unstable stories swaddled in candy colors appealing to the cultural imagination. Miki's show asks us if we examine these stories, can they act as reminders of society's contemporary folklore that can then be buried in the graveyards aside ancient beliefs to which society no longer subscribes?
Masako Miki's Midnight March allows us to consider the greater potential in our understanding of the cultural imagination by contrasting the dark history of yōkai in the dimly lit basement with soft, fuzzy, colorful felt forms all too large for the support of their tiny legs. Through this visual metaphor, the artist suggests the stories embedded in cultures' collective imagination and their invisible forces connected to contemporary culture's pandemonium can be toppled. This poetry of metaphor pulling from seemingly disparate sources points to art's potential for profundity and speaks directly of Miki's creative prowess.
