Miwa Yanagi

Miwa Yanagi (やなぎみわ, Yanagi Miwa) is a Japanese photographic artist.

Miwa Yanagi was born in 1967 in Kobe, Japan. She completed her postgraduate course work at the Kyoto City University of Arts. She is known mainly as a photographer and video artist. She creates an elaborate,and often costly staged event using female models ranging in different ages. After the picture or video is taken, the image may be altered with computer graphics. Her artworks examines self-images and stereotypes of Japanese women in contemporary Japanese society.

Yanagi was influenced by a teacher in high school who was passionate for his artwork. She decided to go into art at Kyoto City University of Arts. After graduating from Kyoto City University of Arts, she began working as a teacher where she began to realize that she was not individualized but rather forced to play an ordinary role of a woman teacher. Her big break came when she was nominated to be in an exhibition in Germany in 1996 at the Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. It was here that her works were exhibited along with artists like Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall. The international exposure to a commercial art market gave her major advantage over other Japanese artists. Because of the lack of a contemporary art market in Japan and her success in Germany in 1996 she decided to display her work overseas. Yanagi currently works and lives in Kyoto, Japan.

Yanagi's best known body of works is her first, Elevator Girls. With it, she focuses on themes of everyday life, self-identity, architecture, and employment in the world of girls who operate the elevators of Japanese department stores.Elevator Girls first started as performance piece early in her career. It was to represent and reflect on what Yanagi was going through at this time. The performance was about a young girl who works in a narrow box, who has to repeat the same task over and over again, day after day. The later photographs of Elevator Girls show women dressed similarly and who often show very little emotion. The switch from performance art to photography was because Yanagi wanted complete control in what was going on. These young models are all physically similar in body composition. The way they are posed shows that they are restricted on what they can do and where they can go, much as restrictions are placed on women culturally. In the photos the elevator girls stare at architectural design or consumer goods. The staring represents society's obsession with consumer goods. These standardized young women in her artwork series symbolized the capitalistic and patriarchal society of Japan and how the roles of women in the workforce of Japan is suppressed and idealized to serve and obey their male-dominated society.

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