Mio SHIRAI
Born 1962 in Kyoto. Graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1988 with a BFA in painting. She moved to New York in 1993 with a grant from the Asian Cultural Council (ACC), where she lived and worked until 2006. Through the use of diverse media such as painting, sculpture, video, and photography, she explore new configurations of time and space in perception by engaging in critical reflection and creative practice on the concept of boundaries. Recent solo exhibitions include “Mio Shirai: Clearing in Woods” Fuchu Art Museum, Tokyo (2023) and “Selected from the CCMA Collection Special Edition: SHIRAI Mio, Chiba City Museum of Art, Chiba (2024). Group exhibitions include “Aichi Triennale 2013” at Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, and “Setouchi Triennale 2013” Uno Port, Okayama.
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Mio Shirai’s work tends to explore on-going issues of relationship among the human being, natural aspects of her environment and artificial aspects of her environment as well as the dynamic boundaries and interchangeable processes of nature’s figure and everyday icons of civilization associated therewith. Her approach encompasses as well as systematic methodology of viewing universal dynamics: rotating and inverting the relationships among the private or inner world and the public self and otherness – objects can exist as interfaces for transcendence between and among these various aspects of worldliness.
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Shirai’s short films draw upon traditional folklore and myths, and popular stories that we all learn as children. Her films retell these stories and myths, imbuing them with a sense of uncanny and absurd — a feeling of being “out of step”, in her own words.