Exploring roles and niches

ARTWALK

Japan, like India, still comprises a large population of women who play "the part". The well-adjusted daughter-in-law, for example, who is essentially subservient.

The ambidextrous wife, essentially presentable and, ideally, pretty. One of a set can easily be substituted by another, there is such little individualism sanctioned.

You see versions of them everywhere "" the near-identical airline hostesses on Jet Airways, for example, eyeshadowed and coiffured to become rotating clones, handpicked to jut out just a little bit from the furnishings, pleasingly neutral and useful.

Makes sense? Then you've synched with Miwa Yanagi, the radical and powerful, almost-40 Japanese artist who constantly explores types and niches, and their place in Japan today.

Having studied and worked in Japan till her late 20s, Miwa has created precisely three prominent bodies of work till date.

Each is spectacular and explores and interrogates the relationship of women with larger social structures and with their own aspirations. Each set of work has been shown extensively everywhere, except for the United States, where it is only displayed this year for the first time, at the Chelsea Art Gallery in New York.

My personal favorite is also Miwa's oldest series "" the Elevator Girls. In earlier times, elevators in Japanese malls were operated not by uniformed men (or Bata-ed staff in gray-brown safari suits, as in India) but exquisitely groomed women. Miwa broadens this role-play to a global context of being and becoming a type.

She works with models in digitally designed backdrops to create sterile, mall-like interiors. She then arranges her models, prescriptively dressed in uniforms "" scorching red, pigment blue or spotless white.

Her large scale, mural like photographs become hyperreal. Models pose in groups, the only forms of life anywhere in the mallscapes and other built interiors. They are dead still, like mannequins. They remain arranged in the aesthetic you'd find in an interior magazine, like the altars of a designer temple.

In a wider sense, Miwa alludes to niches in global Japan. Dwelling on the elevator girls allows her to absorb both idea of role-play and of consumption, given their placement in malls, enhancing the consumptive experience.

Many young Japanese women today create themselves in the likeness of current fashion. Miwa's work comments on this trend, where women play the role of "Fashionable Young Japanese" very seriously. Their choices are based on keeping this look intact.

Not only do they fit a type, but their own appearance, based on fads, are strikingly similar. The devotion to consumerism is also critically examined in the shining mallscapes and their seductive interiors. It's like being in a designer temple. This must-have fashion is reflected back in the perfectly tailored outfits of the elevator girls, a high-quality product that fits in effortlessly with this shopper's paradise.

Photography plays an important role in Miwa's critique, because she mimics commercial advertising for its form and its vocabulary. She arranges models to create moments, and control that blink, riding on the idea of the moment that photography is seen to reveal.

Riding these popular perceptions of the medium, she uses the shift in content to create disjunctions. Not only does it not work on an easy, subconscious level, but the uber-smoothness is unreal.

Its starkness is disturbing. It sears. Within this highly symbolic, stylised art-making, Miwa finds typically Japanese tools to carve her mirrors to the world she inhabits.