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ISHIUCHI MIYAKO – ENIS BATUR

“As I get older, I really feel that I have become more human.”

EB – Ms. Ishiuchi Miyako, the work you developed out of your relationship to your

mother touched me deeply. I have to admit that my personal experience played an

important role: it has been two years since I lost my mother. Before her death, I had

already started writing a book focusing on my mother’s and my grandmother’s old age.

During the preparation of this text, which I am still working on, I encountered works of

many artists concerning this theme. I have to say that your work had a special impact on

me. Do you believe that there is a basic and distinctive difference between the way a man

and a woman sees the body of their mother?

IM – I think there is a difference between them. It is connected with the fact that

every human being is born from a woman. Mothers and daughters have a similar

female body. The body of the mother is similar in nature to that of the daughter.

Whenever I need to, I can exchange my body for that of my mother. Basically,

I think males cannot do the same thing.

In our culture, the figure of the mother has almost a sacred position. I think that being

connected to her with an umbilical cord suggests some religious connotations – an

issue we widely observe the importance of in Mediterranean countries. How would you

describe the framework of the mother image in Japanese culture? In your opinion, would

a contemporary artist revolt against this image or would he/she keep him/herself at an

objective distance? What were the problems awaiting you when you first embarked on

this subject?

I haven’t thought about the image of the mother in Japanese culture per se. As I

couldn’t accept my mother’s death, I felt painful for my loss. It plunged me into the

depths of sadness. I thought I had to do something to get over it. That’s the reason

I photographed my mother’s possessions as if I talked with them. I didn’t get along

with my mother while she was alive, so I think that fact helped me to photograph

them. Personally, I do not feel comfortable with the general image of the mother.

It has implications of a conservative and weak social position. Artists basically tend

to resist the image of the mother.

I was lucky enough to familiarize myself with Japanese literature to a certain extent through some classic works,

starting from the Tales of the Genji and the Basho haiku masters, to several contemporary writers. I was

deeply touched by the role the ‘body’ problematic – the desire to sculpt the body – played for Mishima and by the

merciless standpoint of Kawabata (especially in The House of Sleeping Beauties), who preferred committing

suicide as he could not accept senescence. Is old age an advantageous period of life in general for men in Japan?

Do they express themselves in a freer manner during this period?

I am not interested in the literature by Mishima Yukio and Kawabata Yasunari. I think these works

express a clear male ideology and aestheticism. At the same time, the images they portray are not in fact

widespread in Japanese literature, though they do represent an aspect of it.

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Until I was introduced to your work, the most torrid inquisition on senescence I had ever seen

was in Lucian Freud’s paintings. The way he approached his mother’s body had a traumatic

dimension for me. The fact that you concealed your mother’s face for one reason or another

(based on ethical or aesthetic reasons?), brought us closer to a veiled visage, rather than an

overt exposure of old age. There, the skin, fingernails, joints and nodes stand before our eyes,

telling us something about the time that they have been through. How did you divide reality

into different parts? Is metaphysics hidden in physics or in the physiology?

I didn’t need to show the faces, but I didn’t hide the faces either. There are many

differences between the inner being of the face and the outer information of the

body. I want to express my works as one of the daily things which everybody has

experienced. These works are like the viewer’s own mother’s possessions as I did not

include the face of my mother.

We know that there has been a beauty mangle created for women – in fact also for men – in

every age and in every culture. The era we are living in would totally forbid getting old if it

could and would send those who leave themselves to the natural flow of going old into exile.

Alternately, if desired, the ageing body could well form an aesthetic category. We see that this

possibility is almost ruled out. On the other hand, the ageing body explicitly points out that the

last stage of existence is arrived at. It whispers us that we are cuddling up to death. Do you

think that the Old Person is unable to love him/herself anymore, facing this grammar going

sour, shriveling up and gradually losing its vivacity?

If ageing is bad, how can we live our life? Living things grow, get older, and pass away.

We cannot escape this process. It is a natural and ordinary thing. As I get older, I really

feel that I have become more human. I also know that youth and beauty are superficial

values that can be understood easily. Youth has two sides to ageing, and beauty also

has two sides to ugliness. It is more important for you to be interested in one side or

the other. Feeling at ease with ageing is more natural than thinking of it as a negative.

Shoes, gloves, socks, corset, and panty hose: your work proves that the clothes or objects

stimulating the eroticism in the opposite sex – these fetishes of youth –, turn into objects of

counter-fetish during senescence. Can we talk about a striptease operation, where we change

the rules upside down? I couldn’t help thinking that you took your mother through her clothes,

rather than undressing your mother. Was I wrong?

When I saw the undergarments which my mother wore in spite of her body not

existing anymore, these looked to me like her skin. The undergarments are a second

skin; you’re right. I think my mother is there, wearing this second skin despite her

body not dwelling in them anymore.

Lydia Flem, a psychoanalyst, who had to empty her parents’ house after their death, wrote a

heartbreaking book. Do you agree that the possessions of our parents, especially objects like

gloves, shoes or underpants, which once ‘contained’ them, are some kind of ‘reliquiae’? Does

their privacy have a special place in our memory?

It is possible to see my pictures in that way. As the photographs are objects, it is best to

see them freely. But I am non-religious, so I don’t regard them as a relic at all.

Your work convinced me that there is a deep ‘sense of time’ beneath it. As if a plastic

chronometer is functioning there. Beyond its visual context, the human skin alludes to the

wrinkles on earth. We feel a pulsating rhythm within everything. Do you feel that you have

travelled through different levels of time, while you are preparing for a new artwork, or when

you are actually at work or when you finally decide that you have completed it?

Photography is useful to go back and forth from the past to the present, to the future.

While working in a dark room I feel like I am on a trip around the world. I want to

take and touch time. I always want to embrace time. In this sense, Mother’s gave me

a lot of possibilities. If it is a trip to another phase in time, I had a luxurious voyage.

The questions of this e-mail interview held by Enis Batur were translated from

Turkish to English by Zeynep Güden; the answers of Ishiuchi Miyako have

been translated from Japanese to English by Tomoka Aya.

Photographs © Miyako Ishiuchi “Mother’s”