Masako Miki
The first fully site-responsive exhibition in the new ICA SF at The Cube, Night Parade (working title) will present Masako Miki’s work as never seen before in her largest presentation to date. The exhibition will collapse Miki’s two-dimensional and three-dimensional practices, bringing her paintings known as “Night Parades” to life in experiential form.
Visitors will descend from the upper level of the new ICA SF space to the lower level, encountering throngs of Miki’s signature felted character sculptures in a dramatically darkened environment. Here, we will be fully immersed in Miki’s world of riotous resistance. Dark indigo walls dotted with gold stars will echo the voids in her two-dimensional works, while theatrically lit characters will gather and disperse in complex relationships. Night Parade helps us understand deeper aspects of Miki’s “othered” figures and recognize difference as a positive force, even as we are unsettled by it.
Date
May–September 2025
MASAKO MIKI Artist Website & Instagram
Detail image courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman.
Masako Miki (b. 1973, Osaka, Japan) is an artist whose paintings, sculptures, and installations blur the boundaries between the sacred and the secular. Using a variety of materials, including wool, wood, bronze, ink, and watercolor, Miki creates characterful artworks rooted in the Indigenous culture of her Japanese birthplace but informed by the freedom and ambition of three decades of living in California. As Miki explains, “I hope that my works generate the kind of curiosity and empathy that enables us to come together.”
Miki has enjoyed solo shows and projects at the de Young Museum, San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), CA; ICA San José, CA; and KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville, KY. She opened a two-person exhibition titled “(Super)Natural: Paul Klee and Masako Miki” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on August 17, 2024. Her work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA; BAMPFA; the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, CA; Collección SOLO, Madrid; and Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation, New York, among others. Recent commissions include a site-specific installation for the Minna Natoma Arts Corridor in San Francisco and a permanent installation of bronze sculptures at Uber HQ, San Francisco. Miki has a BFA from Notre Dame de Namur University and an MFA from San José State University, CA. She lives and works in Berkeley, CA. Miki is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, and Ryan Lee, New York. She will have a solo exhibition with Jessica Silverman in 2025.