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 studied Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) in high school, then majored in printmaking at Kyoto City University of Arts. She is currently 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 stated that this method allows her 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 Constellation series (2009–) and the long-running Missing Shade series (begun 2015 and now reaching numbered impressions in the 50s) are her two principal continuing projects. Solo exhibitions include CONSTELLATION 2 at Yuka Sasahara Gallery (Tokyo, 2009), imagecasting at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2010), THE MISSING SHADE 2 at SAI Gallery Osaka (2017), THE MISSING SHADE 3 at WAITINGROOM Tokyo (2018), and Nowhere in Blue at WAITINGROOM (2025). She has had institutional solo shows at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (2015) and Centre Photographie de Mougins (2022), and has been collected by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (now the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum) and the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo.

Miyake won the VOCA Prize in 2010 — one of the most-watched mid-career Japanese contemporary art prizes — and was included in the 2013 touring exhibition Redefining the Multiple: Thirteen Japanese Printmakers (Bates College / University of Tennessee Knoxville / Rochester Contemporary), which placed her alongside Hideki Kimura, Yoshioka Toshinao, and Kouseki Ono as part of the leading younger Japanese print cohort. The 2018 inclusion of multiple Missing Shade prints in the WAITINGROOM solo show The Missing Shade 3 marked the formal recognition of the project as a sustained body of work.

In the 2020s Miyake has expanded into video — single-channel works such as Garden (Potsdam) (2019, 49 min), Garden (Wadakura) (2022, 16 min 30 sec), Seascape (Suzu) 2 (2024, 16 min 30 sec), and Nowhere in Blue 2 (2025, 12 min loop) — and into cyanotype prints on watercolor paper sensitized by sunlight (Blue Print, 2023). 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.