Midori Harima

Midori Harima (播磨みどり, born 1976, Yokohama) is a Japanese conceptual artist and printmaker whose installations use printmaking as a tool of mediation rather than as a vehicle for image production. She is currently based in Kanagawa, Japan, having lived in the United States for sixteen years (West Coast and then New York City) before returning to Japan in 2017.

Harima received her BA in Printmaking from the Women's University of Fine Art in Kanagawa (also known as Joshibi University of Art and Design). Her practice has subsequently developed across video, photography, printmaking, and sculptural installation, with the disciplinary frame of printmaking — its relationship to invisibility, unknowability, unpredictability, and to things that cannot be seen from the front — operating as the conceptual armature for her installation work.

Her most-cited recent installation series, 'Landscape of Prints' (2022–2023), uses silkscreen on backlit film, mirror film, light boxes, and shoji-screen architecture to produce environments in which the viewer encounters printed images through reflection, transmission, and indirection. The 2023 'Landscape of Prints (Primeval Forest)' uses silkscreen on backlight film and mirror film with metal halide lamp; 'A Light Before Yesterday' (2023) uses archival pigment print on backlight film with LED light box plus archival pigment print on Yupo paper with fluorescent film viewer; and 'Shadow of an Image' (2023) is a screen print on vinyl sheets and wood, 86 3/8 × 69 3/4 × 6 1/3 inches in scale.

The earlier 'NEGATIVESCAPE' installations (2008 PVC board version; 2011 form-board version, 16.5 × 9.6 × 8 ft) and the 'Democracy Demonstrates' photographic-archival project (2015 Korea, 2017 NYC) demonstrate her sustained engagement with the printed surface as a conceptual register for political experience. The 'This is a Mirror, after Camnitzer' project (referenced in her video work) is an explicit homage to Luis Camnitzer's 1966–68 conceptual print 'This is a Mirror, You Are a Written Sentence' — Camnitzer being one of the principal post-1960s conceptual printmakers and a touchstone for Harima's reframing of the print as a 'conceptual translation and a technology of mediation.'

Her exhibition history includes the Kala Art Institute (Berkeley), Ulterior Gallery (New York), the Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto (Japan), the Fujisawa City Art Space (Japan), Honey Space (NYC), Deitch Studios, the Kanagawa Prefectural Gallery, Des Lee Gallery at Washington University in St. Louis, and the Tokyo Forum Exhibition Space. She participated in Tokyo Arts and Space's Exchange Residency Program (May–July 2015) for Japan-based creators working abroad. She was a finalist for the Print Center's 97th International Print Annual.

Within the contemporary Japanese print scene Harima represents the strand of conceptual practice for which the print is principally a thinking tool — not a finished editioned object on the wall but a structural metaphor for ephemerality, reproduction, and unseeability. Her work bridges the contemporary American conceptual-print tradition (Camnitzer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sue Coe) with the post-2000s Japanese installation-art scene, and she is one of the principal Japanese diaspora print-conceptualists of her generation.