Miyuki Takenaka - Light Informed by Darkness

Our encounter with Miyuki Takenaka goes back to the Daikanyama Art Fair in 2002 (the original name of the present Daikanyama Festival Sarugaku-matsuri). One experienced gallerist brought Takenaka along as their most highly-recommended artist. In hindsight, I might define her watercolour drawing and resin technique as a trifle immature, but since then, her trajectory has been consistent, and her skill has grown with her. Ten years later, in 2012 she participated in the VOCA exhibition, and demonstrated how her work had deepened. Since then, she has moved ahead with resin work in three-dimensions, and also with works using resin and watercolour on the same picture plane. She has produced some of these for Art Front Gallery exhibitions.
Then suddenly in 2013, she began using a 35mm film, and she showed us some trial pieces. I was reminded of how she used to work in film development, and I now saw works of art that were clearly the result of ten full years of experimentation. This new group of works visualises normally-invisible lights rays. It reveals something that has begun to take shape through the physicality of film, and she gives the film colour by exposure at arbitrary lengths of time, and then she layers them.
What kind of artist is Miyuki Takenaka? In her drawing, she depicted objects as if they were some kind of seed obtained by the manipulation of afterimages, themselves derived by closing the eyes tightly. In her resin series, she visualised something invisible through the use of graded light made with transparent resin. Now she has added third mode of expression to add to those poles. This made me realise what she had been trying to capture all along by her use of the forms of seeds and the materials of resin. It may be her intention to show ambiguous things yet to be made clearly recognisable and still to be defined in terms of what is understandable to our faculty of sight.
This new exhibition, ten years in the making, with the artist using film, will, I am sure, be the manifestation of Takenaka’s urge to search for ambiguous imagistic phenomena within concrete objects.

Toshiro Kondo, Art Front Gallery