Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with painter, sculptor, and installation artist Masako Miki from her quaint studio in Berkeley, California. Miki, who hails from Osaka, Japan and moved to America at the age of 19, talks at length in our conversation about boundary: that between Western and Eastern belief systems; that between public and private art; that between art of the past and art of the present. Miki’s fascination with these divides, as well as her fond remembrance of encounters with deities and spirits at rituals or in everyday life in Japan, doesn’t just inform her art—it is her art. “[My characters are] good and bad. They’re kind. They’re benevolent and then malevolent. They’re sacred and secular, they’re constantly embracing the dichotomies, which, to me, [is what it’s] about. Blowing the boundaries.”

Now living and working in the Bay Area, Miki harbors special fondness for a cultural environment where proximity to other possible worlds is not taken as a surprise or a threat, but accepted as part of the metaphysical givens. In spite of American secularism telling us otherwise, the artist recognizes that the visible world does not constitute the totality of things. Seeking the invisible and the elusive, Miki’s insistence on the place of the spiritual in public life emanates throughout her body of work, simultaneously systematic and poetic, meticulously mining historical traditions for speculative fictions capable of repairing and healing.

Shortly before we spoke, Miki won the Anderson Ranch Visiting Artist Prize for her felt sculptures “Kyōrinrin” (2024), inspired by the spirit of knowledge formed from extravagant Buddhist scriptures left unstudied and gathering dust, and “Gobo Obake” (2024), a Burdock Roots gaining consciousness through age, presented at Ryan Lee Gallery’s booth at this year’s Aspen Art fair. “I use Japanese mythology as a context,” the artist tells me of the ways her character work intertwines with various spiritual ideologies. “My work is not about them...when you’re writing fiction you need to have convincing characters to navigate the ideas and content. I use folklore as a context, [but my work is] really all about expanding this imagination in which my characters can exist.”

Miki’s endeavor of imaginative expansion is evident in her current project at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: (Super)Natural: Paul Klee and Masako Miki. The exhibition pairs up 17 Klee drawings from the museum’s collection (personally selected by Miki) with Miki’s own grandiose watercolor landscape “Hyakki Yagyo, Night Parade of One Hundred Demons—Beginning of Another Life with Ruby Red Fox Deity” (2021). The painting renders creatures of Japanese folklore marching through the streets of Kyoto at night. In Miki’s reworking, the ominous disruption of the already blurry boundary between the real world and the supernatural world is transformed into an almost endearingly celebratory observation of colorful dynamism and playful shapes. Propelled by the affective power derived from the universally evocative capacity of imagining, Miki works expand the original contexts of Japanese folklore and mythology and creatively generate new tales for our turbulent times.

Having read Klee’s diaries (Klee himself would have called them “creative confessions”) in preparation for (Super)Natural, Miki feels particularly compelled by Klee’s insistence on representing what is beneath, besides, or beyond the world of visible things: “There are many more latent realities,” Miki says of Klee. “I think he’s saying: ‘What we see is one isolated incident, that what we chose to believe is the only ultimate reality.’ There’s more than what we see, there’s more than what we believe that’s in his creative process—I think he’s trying to reveal something that is not quite happening yet, but it could be part of a reality. I feel in my work, this is what I’m trying to do as well. It’s really about imagining something that hasn’t happened yet.”

Miki also translates her various characters into sculptures. While being a visiting professor at UC Davis, Miki became immersed in the intricate process of felting, which involves a nearly endless process of needling upon textiles with heat. The hands-on and durational approach creates an often-lost intimacy between her and the materials being worked upon. Miki’s felted character sculptures thus take on a considered and constantly evolving texture and materiality where the tactile, processual conditions of sculpture-making become an investiture of visual pleasure itself. “I want my viewers to come closer to the sculptures,” Miki says. And indeed, she succeeds in bridging the gap between subject and object quite often. Ancient traditions become alluring symbols of non-human agency that keep spectators hooked.

Miki’s public sculpture practice—like her larger-than-life bronze sculptures mounted in the campus of San Francisco’s Uber HQ—evoke a different sense of the fantastical in a medium that has traditionally leaned on the side of singularity and closedness of existence. The display at Uber HQ is inspired by a common animistic story widely circulated in Japan, one in which discarded utilitarian tools that were considered replaceable could potentially become vengefully alive, feeling abandoned by their previous owners. Neither wanting to create something spatially overpowering to spectators—with the story’s troubling history associated with how oppressive regimes organize didactic relations through manufactured architecture—nor desiring to fall back into the trope of celebrating the technological wonders of human authorship, Miki tried to blend the humor of pop art with minimalistic smoothness via a non-hierarchical and collaborative process between Miki and her fabricators:

 “Art has the power to transform perspectives and make us question, ‘What is this?’ It should be a simple invitation; if it’s too didactic or people feel like they’re not invited, people might not feel engaged. How do you involve the community?” She asks. “To me, it’s crucial that people feel they can be a part of it.They’re not going to be judged by how they look or where they come from. Public art projects provide a way for everyone to access and engage with what I consider one of the most important human attributes... the public domain brings a wider audience to me, and it’s important for bringing people together through all different facets of accessibility.”

Confronting the question of human empathy—or lack thereof—under advanced capitalism is also of personal significance to Miki. When I point out that her sculptures fit into the conventional definitions of “cute,” Miki gives me a crash course on the history of cuteness in Japanese culture. According to the artist, cute or its Japanese equivalent, kawaii, has often, in popular English discourse, lost its original meaning, which is to feel compassion for the subject of adoration and to delight in the magnificent matter of the living world. The word kawaii had its etymological origin in Lady Murasaki’s 11th-century novel The Tale of Genji. In the novel, Murasaki uses the word kawaisō to describe feeling sad or sorry for piteous things, objects, or people. “I think that cuteness, it’s not quite the word that I feel affiliated to,” she says. “Even though my work has been described as cute, it’s more about the subject matter. Including the complex meaning of the cuteness, meaning it’s more about the subject matter in that you feel compassion.You embrace and accept [the works] as they are, which is in a very incomplete stage of how things are described. It really releases everything of why I make the work that I make, right? 

The question of empathy takes on another meaning for Miki, which is intimately implicated in her personal identity crisis and formation. After immigrating to the United States, Miki underwent a period of adjustment, leaving certain cultural traits behind without fully discarding them, and absorbing the unfamiliar cultural elements of her new environment—without fully essentializing them as part of her fixed self.

Navigating such cultural dilemma through art, Miki builds a cross-generational affiliation with Isamu Noguchi and Ruth Asawa, two Japanese modernist artists who strive to carve out ways of resolving this international struggle—to simultaneously understand oneself empathetically while being understood through the empathy of others—in their own practice. She finds herself drawn to Noguchi’s “Play Mountain,” where children are invited to self-direct creative forms of play—poignant reminders that understanding oneself is a non-linear journey and is always already situated in a community. “The most important part of being an artist is that we create content for people, but they have to apply it themselves, to think beyond what they see. The artwork is never just descriptive, right?” she asks. “It’s more than that.”

“I feel that my work has this kind of ambiguity. I’m referencing folklore, but it’s really about embracing these imaginations. The idea of our ability to create fiction and illusion is a powerful tool for us because that’s how we navigate and create a common story that connects us.” I ask Miki what kind of lessons she would like her audience to take away from her art. She admits that she hopes that any of these “lessons” are not concrete givens, but rather calls for action; calls for creative becoming.

In a world torn by political despair and ecological catastrophe, old rules fail to apply, and new ways of living that acknowledge our interconnectedness—a kind of connectedness that Miki and her audience are equally navigating—are being synthesized. Making works at the threshold of what is believable and what is not, Miki sees herself as part of a larger, looser movement of breaking apart dichotomies, embracing contradictions, and forming new allegiances and alliances. 

Written by Qingyuan Deng