The Container

Over the last few years she has engaged in a variety of practices that investigate an array of means to map places and people in drawings and sculptures. Her efforts began while focusing on specific locations, over time evolving into a personal investigation of what constitutes a city. Her process centered on how individuals perceive particular places. How do individuals relate to certain sites? Is her Tokyo, for example, the same as someone else’s? The answer is, of course, that cities, like everything else in life, are cladded with personal memory and associations. Different entities may have a completely different understanding and reflection of exactly the same route or place. Each, predisposed to personal connotations and life experiences.

Those private understandings individuals experience of the same place trigger Kaneko’s art practice. She views locations as a memory archive, constructed of experiences, histories, and associations. She often works with metal, as the material carries an industrial “city-like” connotation, but also for its wide usage in everyday life (from construction to farming), its versatility and ability to liquify — all associated, in Kaneko’s mind, with the qualities of a city. 

Miya Kaneko’s exhibition at The Container, In search of the juncture of three coincidental sites, showcases three pieces of work from different points of her practice, highlighting the progression of her relationship with cities and maps. The earliest piece the show is presenting is a large three-dimensional map of Tokyo, entitled Tokyo (2013), constructed from iron rods. The sculpture is based on reference maps from postwar Tokyo and current maps of the city; inspired by the changes and complex evolution of Tokyo during that period of time. 

The sculpture is delicately complex and layered, weaving arteries of the city and changing roads, like a humongous spider web, illustrating how the weight of history and memory facilitate physical and emotional change over time. Although the structure is constructed from solid iron rods, it projects fragility and tenuousness, and is an allegory to the relationship between the industrial nature of large cities in contrast to their tentative histories and memory.

In search of the juncture of three coincidental sites features also two interconnected community-inspired projects by Kaneko. One, a drawing, a large-sized map, Kaneko has produced especially for The Container, Release the map from the scale; and the other, is a selection of aluminum plates engraved with city names (recently exhibited in a large group show at Tokyo Midtown). Both of these projects rely on input the artist receives from the public (gallery visitors / workshops / emails) in an effort to produce a portrait of a city, or a portraits of individuals. 

In the aluminium drawings, Dissect the City and Achieve Oblivion, plates of aluminium engraved with city names, members of the public are requested to contribute a map of an important site / city, along with a description of the place and their relation to it. The “maps” may take many forms—actual ones, or photographs, or even notes and personal recollections from a certain location. Those are integrated by Kaneko to create visual representations inspired by her own understanding and associations with the information collected.

Kaneko’s newest project, Invisible map, takes the the intersection between different peoples’ experiences and memories a step further. Through data provided by members of the public, associative links and overlaps are forged, imagined and real, to fabricate tangible connections and shapes, resulting in a drawing, a diagram of sorts. The evolving invisible “community” (Kaneko calls it a “city”) perhaps does not exist physically, but transcends from shared cognitive memory and experience. These cities, and their mapping, the resulting drawings, are produced through interactive workshops with members of the public, in an effort to build bespoke “spaces” where data is shared simultaneously by a variety of seemingly unconnected people, forging associative links and adding layers of complexity that are forever changing and evolving, with indefinite scale or configurations.

Miya Kaneko’s preoccupation with cities and mapping joins personal, historical and cultural recollections to flesh out a collective memory, and to remind us that places are more than a pin on the ubiquitous GPS-controlled digital maps we have grown so accustomed to and dependent on. Places have memory of their own, cultivated by the experiences and associations of many.   

Miya Kaneko graduated in 2011 from Tama Art University with a bachelor’s degree in metal works. She obtained a master’s degree in art in 2013, and Ph.D. in 2017 at Tama Art University Graduate School of Art and Design. Her recent exhibitions include Tama Art University Doctoral Program Graduation Exhibition at Tama Art University Museum in Tokyo, 2017; JIGUM exhibition at Art District_p in Busan, South Korea, 2016; and Kaneko Miya: Searching for the Image of Cities at KOMAGOME1-14cas in Tokyo, 2016. She has recently also won the Grand Prize Award of Tokyo Midtown Art and Design Competition (2017), and exhibited last May as part of Roppongi Art Night 2018. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Koganecho, Yokohama.