I have been an admirer of Miwa Yanagi since encountering her series "My Grandmothers" at the 2001 Yokohama Triennale. In that body of work the artist displayed extraordinary skill in using makeup and staging to transform a number of young women into images of their ideal grandmothers, such as screamingly insouciant sexagenarians motorcycling over the Golden Gate Bridge -- that sort of thing. The large photographs were colorful, funny and full of life, suggesting it was only natural to leapfrog the spirit of childhood over the conventions of middle age, and catch hold of it again in one's senior years.
There is a Japanese proverb that says human beings live close to "the other side of life" until age six, then return to that state when they reach 60. If Yanagi's earlier work hinted at this, then her new exhibition seeks to fully affirm it, albeit in a somewhat unsettling manner. Yanagi takes as her point of departure Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother," a short story about a wicked old woman who confines her granddaughter to a tent and forces her into prostitution. Yanagi then twists that story, along with a number of fairy tales, such that the innocent, victimized children are now the evil ones, teasing and tormenting the adults.
The result is the exhibition "The Incredible Tale of the Innocent Old Lady and the Heartless Young Girl," now showing at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art.