Saori Miyake

Saori Miyake (born 1975, Gifu) is a Japanese artist whose central practice is the photogram — a cameraless photographic image produced by exposing photosensitive paper to drawn or layered surfaces — used as a print medium. She trained at Kyoto City University of Arts, studying in the Faculty of Fine Arts (BFA 1998, MFA 2000) with an exchange period at the Royal College of Art in London, and is based in Kyoto.

Miyake's working method involves drawing on a transparent acetate sheet and reversing existing photographic source images so that what would normally be a positive becomes a negative. The transparent drawing is then placed against photosensitive gelatin silver paper and exposed under controlled light to produce a photogram in which the linework appears as luminous shadow on a dark ground. The technique sits formally between drawing, printmaking, and analog photography; the resulting prints are issued as gelatin silver prints and shown alongside her video and cyanotype work. She has described this method as a way to investigate shadows as images and the act of seeing as both physical and psychological — the shadow of a drawing rather than the photographic record of an object.

The long-running Missing Shade series, begun in 2015, is her principal continuing project. Solo exhibitions include THE MISSING SHADE at Fukugan Gallery, Osaka (2015), THE MISSING SHADE 2 at SAI Gallery, Osaka (2017), THE MISSING SHADE 3 at WAITINGROOM, Tokyo (2018), Garden | Potsdam at SPACE TGC, Tokyo (2019), and Nowhere in Blue at WAITINGROOM, Tokyo (2023). Her work is held in public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kyoto City University of Arts, and the Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama.

Miyake won the VOCA Prize in 2010 — one of the most-watched awards for younger Japanese contemporary artists — and was included in the 2013 touring exhibition Redefining the Multiple: Thirteen Japanese Printmakers, organized by the Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture at the University of Tennessee and shown at venues including Bates College and the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester. The exhibition placed her alongside printmakers such as Hideki Kimura, Toshinao Yoshioka, and Kouseki Ono.

In recent years Miyake has expanded into single-channel video — including work first shown in her 2019 Garden | Potsdam exhibition — and into cyanotype prints on watercolor paper sensitized by sunlight. The video and cyanotype work both extend the photogram practice into duration and into open-air solar exposure, but the photogram itself remains the central printed form.

Miyake is represented by WAITINGROOM in Tokyo. Within Japanese contemporary printmaking she occupies a distinctive position as one of the few artists to have built a major career on cameraless photographic process treated as a print medium — a position that places her in conversation with the international photogram tradition of Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Floris Neususs, but with a specifically Japanese drawing tradition behind the linework that becomes the photogram source.