Mishima Kimiyo was born in Osaka in 1932 and began her artistic career as a painter in the early 1960s. During this period, she produced collages using newspapers, discarded printing waste, and old movie posters, materials that gradually accumulated in her studio and led to a pivotal shift in her practice. From this process emerged her now-iconic newspaper-shaped ceramic works, through which she sought to question the nature and instability of information. As she noted, transforming newspapers from paper into ceramic allowed her to express a sense of crisis surrounding the transience and authority of mass media.
Mishima’s work is recognized for its conceptual rigor and technical mastery, blurring the boundaries between sculpture, ceramics, and social commentary. In 2021, she was awarded the Japan Ceramics Society Gold Award in recognition of her profound contributions to the field and her sustained experimental spirit.
Her work is held in major public collections worldwide, including the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Musée Cernuschi, Paris; the Museum of Faenza; the Ariana Museum, Geneva; the Keramion Museum for Contemporary Ceramic Art, Germany; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Everson Museum of Art, New York; the Ohara Museum of Art, Okayama; the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park; the Gifu Prefectural Museum of Modern Ceramic Art; and Benesse Art Site Naoshima, among many others.
An EXHIBITION that also displayed her works "Kaika"Digital Catalog
