‘I absolutely want to make (the visuals) beautiful, but if a film is just beautiful it’s no different from a promotional video,’ Ninagawa stated in an interview with the Japan Times in 2007 around the release of her debut feature, Sakuran. If her photography tells a story through a single still image with an emphasis on appearance to convey an emotion, Ninagawa’s approach to film is the opposite: her focus to filmmaking is to ensure she can tell an interesting story only she is able to, using her other talents to enhance and compliment this in response. Which brings us back to Mika Ninagawa’s filmography. You see an increased emphasis on color as time goes on (even just 2 years later in Acid Bloom, colors for flowers are much more saturated than those in Pink Rose Suite), while there’s an increased desire to capture an exaggerated reality, photographing landscapes and people with resemblance to everyday scenes while being exaggerated through artificiality through collections such as Princess. One of her early solo photography books, Pink Rose Suite, published in 2001, holds a large focus on photography of natural life and flowers, with an emphasis on bright colors and a lack of focus and plentiful blur forcing observers to take in the entire scene and the atmosphere within it. She often saturates the colors of the subjects of her work, and this has been a mainstay of her personal work since her debut. What immediately stands out when looking at her work is her saturated color palette, a style that came more into prominence for her as her style evolved over her career. This includes world-famous awards like the Canon New Cosmos Award. Even early on, she was winning various prestigious awards for her work photographing flowers, fish, landscapes, people and more. Before Ninagawa was a director, she was (and continues to release work as) a well-established photographer, rising to prominence in the 1990s as part of the Onnanoko Shashin movement of photography, a movement defined by young female photographers who took images of the personal and everyday, often through a point-and-shoot style of photography. To discuss Mika Ninagawa’s filmography and what makes her work not just unique but engaging to watch, you don’t start with her directorial debut. Ahead of the release of Followers on February 27th, I chose to dive into Mika Ninagawa’s body of work to explore what her releases are trying to say and why they’re worth checking out. I’ve been meaning to check out her other works ever since, both inside and outside of the world of film, so the news recently that the director would be following up on her work on the film No Longer Human with a web series for Netflix seemed like a perfect excuse to dive in. The movie stuck in my mind ever since and, even if it was flawed in places, it stood apart for how it avoided the easy utilization style over substance, using this unique visual language to contribute to the story being told. In 2020, her newest photo book “TOKYO” was published.Last year, I was introduced to the bright, neon-filled, colorful worlds created at the hands of Japanese director Mika Ninagawa through the release of her then-newest film, Diner. From 2018, her exhibition “MIKA NINAGAWA-INTO FICTION/REALITY” was opened at Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto and is currently toured in various museums in Japan until 2021. In 2017, her retrospective “MIKA NINAGAWA” was opened in Shanghai and was well received by the audience. In 2016, her large-scaled exhibition was held in Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei and has renewed the historical record of visitors. In 2010, her photo book MIKA NINAGAWA was published with Rizzoli N.Y. Her retrospective solo exhibition in 2008 “Mika Ninagawa: Earthly Flowers, Heavenly Colors” toured art museums throughout Japan. In 2020, the Netflix original drama “FOLLOWERS” was released in 190 countries. She also engaged in creating various movies as a director including “Sakuran”(2007), “Helter Skelter”(2012), “Diner”(2019) and “No Longer Human”(2019). Mika Ninagawa has been accredited with numerous photography awards including the most authoritative Kimura Ihei Photography Award in Japan.
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