LOS ANGELES, CA.- BLUM announced the global representation of the late artist Kimiyo Mishima (b. 1932, Osaka, Japan; d. 2024, Osaka, Japan), a pioneer of ceramics and assemblage whose work complements the international artistic milieus of Neo-Dada, Pop art, and environmental art, while remaining wholly distinct. An avid and acute observer of everyday life, Mishima often incorporated daily newspapers, printed ephemera, and the detritus of mass consumerism and the information age into her work—initially taking the form of silkscreened collage paintings.


🎨 Discover the artistry of Kimiyo Mishima! Explore captivating books on her groundbreaking work and unique artistic vision. Find your next inspiring art book on Amazon.


Mishima’s work will be presented by BLUM for the first time at Art Basel, Switzerland, this June. Following in September, BLUM New York’s inaugural exhibition, Written with a Splash of Blood, will spotlight Mishima’s innovative collage paintings and sculptures. A major survey of Mishima’s work will be unveiled thereafter in November at BLUM Los Angeles. Mishima’s prolific artistic practice anchors BLUM’s commitment to innovative artists who push the art historical canon of not only postwar Japan, but of global contemporary art. As one of Japan’s most celebrated artists, Mishima’s extensive painting, collage, and ceramic practices engage Neo-Dada’s discourses of political critique, conceptual art’s notion of time as a lived experience, as well as ecological intersections between information and waste.

Kimiyo Mishima (b. 1932, Osaka, Japan; d. 2024, Osaka, Japan) was a pioneer of ceramics and assemblage whose work complements the international artistic milieus of Neo-Dada, Pop art, and environmental art, while remaining wholly distinct. An avid and acute observer of everyday life, Mishima often incorporated daily newspapers, printed ephemera, and the detritus of mass consumerism and the information age into her work—initially taking the form of silkscreened collage paintings.

Born in 1932, Mishima spent her adolescence in Osaka during World War II. She had a voracious curiosity to inspect the world through microscopes, with aspirations to become a medical researcher and clone humans. She eventually took oil painting classes with artist Shigeshi Mishima (1920–1985), her future husband, who studied with Gutai artists, including the founder Jirō Yoshihara. Both were exposed to the radical experimental activities in the Kansai region at this time, including Gutai, as well as the dominant influence of Art Informel during Japan’s rapid postwar reconstruction period. In 1954, Mishima began participating in the annual Independent Art Association (Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai) with figuration, still lifes, and gestural abstraction, winning the Independent Prize and the Suda Prize in 1963. In the early to mid-1960s, she began to experiment with collage, incorporating found objects such as indigo-dyed fabrics and printed matter such as posters, ticket stubs, and LIFE magazine cut-outs. She started silk-screening her collages into large-scale paintings using oil and acrylic. One of the iconic art historical motifs that appears in several of her collage paintings during this period is Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. In Transfiguration of Venus VI (1967), the figure of Venus appears throughout, either in a serial pattern on blocks of gray background or as blue outlined figures stamped in a spiral atop newspapers. In the center is a shadow-like newsprint image of a soldier from Saigon, an ominous yet highly suggestive juxtaposition at the height of the Vietnam War. The dramatic compositional structures of these collage paintings reflect an awareness of the social realist artistic strategies of German Dada and Russian Constructivism as well as a dialogue with the 1950s photomontages of Romare Bearden.

In the early 1970s, Mishima turned to ceramics as a primary medium and began rolling sheets of clay (reminiscent of the dough used for udon noodles) and silkscreened newsprint images with ceramic transfer sheets, which she then glazed. She found that this medium could replicate stacked, rolled, or crumpled newspapers as well as manufactured products such as soda bottles, cardboard fruit boxes, and waste bins filled with cans. Inspired by watching a rice bowl break, Mishima often referred to these works as “breakable printed matter,” infusing them with deadpan humor. She was careful not to make the ceramic replica too seamless and painted the details by hand. What resulted was an uncanny resemblance to the original, and yet Mishima’s objective lay in the viewer’s observation and discovery of its distinctions and the unsettling fleeting quality of information and mass consumption. As a nod to Warhol, Mishima also created ceramic cardboard boxes, but rather than an embrace of consumer culture, she employed the medium’s fragility to transform the cheap, disposable quality of the cartons into a dark fissure of modern society.

Among her most profound installations, Memory of the 20th Century (1984–2013) tracks the existential accumulation of newsprint from one hundred years, silkscreened onto 10,600 firebricks that took the artist nearly three decades to make. Mishima’s later work increasingly addressed ecologies of waste, often incorporating surplus soil, slag, and volcanic ash, along with discarded everyday items such as pots, clocks, cables and twisted scrap metal. In one of her quintessential outdoor sculptures, Another Rebirth 2005-N (2005), oversized ceramic newspapers and flyers fill a 15-foot wastebasket in Naoshima. As curator Hirokazu Tokuyama writes, “By endowing information, in the form of newspapers and flyers, with the physical mass of ceramics, she gave the information material weight and presence in the real world.” The information not only becomes permanent, but also has the elusive potential for instant destruction, an apropos metaphor for the current state of the world.

Mishima has been celebrated with institutional solo exhibitions such as the recent retrospective at Nerima Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2024); Museum of Modern Ceramic Art, Gifu, Japan (2023), Art Factory Jonanjima, Tokyo, Japan (2015); and Contemporary Art Museum Ise, Mie Prefecture, Japan (2004). An installation-scaled sculptural work by the artist is on permanent display at Benesse Art Site, Naoshima, Japan. Mishima was prominently featured in the lauded exhibition Another Energy: Power to Continue Challenging 16 Women Artists from around the World at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2021–22). The artist’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; British Museum, London, UK; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; M+, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, among others. A major monograph of the artist’s work, Kimiyo Mishima: Memories for the Future (Kyoto, Japan: Seigensha Art Publishing), was released in 2024 with new scholarship by Tokuyama Hirokazu (Mori Art Museum), Ito Masanobu (Nerima Art Museum), and artist Yasumasa Morimura.


Artdaily participates in the Amazon Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn commissions by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. When you purchase through our links, we may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. These commissions help us continue curating and sharing the art world’s latest news, stories, and resources with our readers.