Tuesday 13 July 2021
12:00pm – 1:00pm

Mika Ninagawa in conversation with Dr Lena Fritsch

This event will start at 12pm BST

Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation

Fully booked

In this webinar chaired by Lena Fritsch, celebrated Japanese photographer and film director Mika Ninagawa spoke about her art practice, ranging from her iconic photographs of cherry blossoms and goldfish to her recent Utsurundesu series and portraits of Japanese Paralympics athletes. We also explored how she has adjusted her activities as a photographer during the pandemic, her feelings on social distancing and her view of the world today. Ninagawa’s work is currently on view at the Daiwa Foundation (15 June to 30 July 2021) and will soon also be displayed prominently at the Ashmolean Museum, as part of the Tokyo: Art & Photography exhibition.

A short summary of the event can be found via the link below, located on the Foundation’s Facebook page:

Event Summary

About the contributors

Dr Lena Fritsch

Dr Lena Fritsch (moderator) is the Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum (University of Oxford), working on exhibitions, displays and acquisitions of international art. One of her main research areas is Japanese art and photography of the 20th and 21st centuries. Before joining the Ashmolean, she was a curator at Tate Modern. In 2018 Fritsch published one of the first overviews on Japanese photography in English: Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945 (English version with Thames & Hudson, Japanese with Seigensha). Other publications include Tokyo: Art & Photography (2021), A.R. Penck: I Think in Pictures (2019), an English-language version of Moriyama Daido’s Tales of Tono (2012), The Body as a Screen: Japanese Art Photography of the 1990s (2011), and Yasumasa Morimura’s Self-Portrait as Actress (2008). Fritsch holds a PhD from Bonn University, and also studied at Keio University, Tokyo.

Mika Ninagawa

Mika Ninagawa is a celebrated photographer and film director, and the recipient of numerous distinguished awards including the Kimura Ihei Photography Award. Besides various short films, she has directed the feature-length works Sakuran (2007), Helter Skelter (2012), Diner (2019), No Long Human (2019), as well as the Netflix series Followers (2020). Her exhibition Mika Ninagawa: Earthly Flowers, Heavenly Colors was hugely popular and broke attendance records for exhibitions at a number of museums around Japan, and her solo exhibition Mika Ninagawa -into fiction and reality- has been touring Japan since 2018. She is represented by Tomio Koyama Gallery as a contemporary artist.