Against the tradition of bijinga (beautiful women pictures) that runs through Japanese art, there is an antithetical stream that draws attention to a grotesque and timeworn femininity. In noh plays, the celebrated early 9th-century beauty of the Heian Era, Ono no Komachi, is sometimes portrayed after her looks have faded and she has become an elderly beggar. During the Edo Period (1603-1867), there was the popular theme of Yamauba, a wild witch living the mountains. In the 20th century, the tradition continued with the paintings of ghoulish geisha from artists Shinso Okamoto and Chusei Inagaki.
The apparent contemporary to these precedents, Miwa Yanagi (b. 1967), is showing her "Windswept Women: The Old Girls' Troupe" series of photos concurrently at the National Museum of Art, Osaka (her first solo show in west Japan in seven years), and at the Venice Biennale. Yanagi started receiving critical acclaim from the mid-'90s for her work addressing Japanese feminine stereotypes, and now, as one of Japan's artistic representatives on the international stage, she is garnering further attention with her more mythic gestures. Her "Po-po Nyangnyang" exhibition at the National Museum of Art also includes works from two other series, "Fairy Tale" (2004-06) and ongoing "My Grandmothers."
There are five of Yanagi's "windswept" women, who flail and gyrate to primeval music as cave-girl go-go dancers in a desolate landscape under tempestuous skies. They have ridiculously proportioned breasts that bulge to bursting or sag into gnarled protuberances and the figures themselves synthesize youth with old age. The girl with the youngest looking legs, for example, bears the most macerated breasts.