Cute & Cruel: Izumi Miyazaki at Wild Project Gallery, summer 2016

Cute and Cruel – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (30 Jun – 30 Jul 2016), record WPG.07 in this catalogue, was the first solo exhibition anywhere by Izumi Miyazaki. She was born in 1994 in Yamanashi Prefecture, had been posting self-portraits to a Tumblr account since 2012, and graduated in 2016 from the Imaging Arts department of Musashino Art University in Tokyo, months before the show opened. A gallery at 22, rue Louvigny, nine months old and listing five artists on its website, herself among them, gave a photographer who had never had a wall of her own her first one — some 6,000 miles from her studio, in a country she is not recorded as having visited for the occasion.

Of all fourteen exhibitions in this catalogue, WPG.07 is the one the wider web still remembers. It was written up by design and photography titles in five countries between June 2016 and July 2017 — no other show in the gallery's programme drew half as much — and a decade later two of those articles are still online and still citing the gallery's own artist and exhibition pages by name. The show that generated that attention lasted a little over four weeks in a small commercial space in a small capital, and it is unusually badly documented for something so consequential.

Exhibition

Cute and Cruel – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (30 Jun – 30 Jul 2016)

Record

WPG.07

Artist

Izumi Miyazaki (b. 1994, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan)

Status

First solo exhibition of the artist's career

Works

Eleven images in the gallery's own slideshow for the show; no checklist, no dimensions and no edition sizes survive

Venue

The gallery then operated at 22, rue Louvigny, Luxembourg City (historical address), open Wednesday to Friday afternoons and Saturday

Contemporary press

It's Nice That, 22 Jun 2016 · Booooooom, 28 Jun 2016 · L'Œil de la Photographie, 30 Jun 2016 · CNN Style, 2 Aug 2016 · Carnet d'Art, 21 Sep 2016

The artist the gallery took on

Wild Project Gallery opened in October 2015 with In Memoriam – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (2 Oct – 21 Nov 2015), the Sabine Pigalle show, and spent its first year on artists with careers already in progress: Pigalle, Jeanne Susplugas, Emmanuelle Bousquet, and the memorial presence of Leila Alaoui. Miyazaki was the exception in every respect — the youngest by a wide margin, the only Japanese artist on the roster, and the only one whose reputation had been built entirely on a platform rather than in rooms. The gallery's lineage, traced in the Record, ran back to a Paris photography dealership; taking on an art-school student with a Tumblr following was not an obvious extension of it.

The trajectory that made her legible to a European dealer is dated and public. She opened the Tumblr account in the summer of 2012, as a student, and the pictures accumulated an international audience over the following three years — TIME ran a piece on the account in January 2015, while she was still enrolled. By the spring of 2016 the work was being circulated by photography blogs faster than any gallery could have placed her. The gallery's own French-language page on the artist, captured by the Internet Archive on 8 July 2016 while the show was hanging, records the state of that audience as the gallery understood it: a Tumblr of some four thousand subscribers, noticed by a great many photography bloggers. It also records her as twenty-one years old, which is worth flagging, because the age question became a small running joke in her press file — CNN Style called her twenty-two in early August, and Feature Shoot, writing in July 2017, counted three different ages in the previous year's coverage (twenty-two, twenty and eighteen) and reported speaking to the gallery while preparing the piece without the question being settled. Born in 1994, she was twenty-one or twenty-two during the run; the public record does not give the month.

What hung, and what the archive lost

No checklist survives. The gallery published its exhibition documentation as a slideshow of numbered frames on its own website; that website was rebuilt onto a different platform in 2017, and the images went with it.

What can be established is the count. The slideshow for Cute and Cruel held eleven images. The Internet Archive captured five of its pages on 6 July 2016, a week into the run — the exhibition's index page and frames five, six, seven and eight, each titled in the form Images 5/11 — and every capture carries the same strip of eleven thumbnails, in a fixed order, at the foot of the frame. So the number of works the gallery chose to publish for the show is documented, and their sequence is documented, and that is all. When the crawler came for the image files themselves, on 28 February 2017, the gallery had already migrated: every request for one of the eleven pictures answered with a redirect and then a 404, and the archive holds no capture of any of them. Eleven frames survive as empty windows, and the hero plate above stands in for them.

Which pictures they were can be narrowed but not fixed, from the images the press circulated with the announcement. It's Nice That, running the news on 22 June 2016, published four works and named three: Consciousness, Measure and Fish. Booooooom followed on 28 June with six images, untitled in the post, crediting the show and the gallery. CNN Style's interview feature in August was accompanied by an eight-picture set whose every caption reads, in the magazine's own wording, that the images are copyright Izumi Miyazaki, courtesy Wild Project Gallery and Off Shot — the clearest evidence in the file that the Luxembourg gallery was handling her pictures internationally that summer, alongside the Japanese agency. Titles legible in that set include Tomato (2015), Eye (2013), Hair Cut (2016) and Rice Ball Mountain (2016). Whether any of those hung on rue Louvigny cannot be confirmed from what remains; that they were the pictures the gallery and its artist were putting into circulation during the exhibition can be.

The gallery's artist page adds one more indirect index. Its French text runs through the recurring motifs of the work — the knife, the rice, the tomato juice, the doubled figure — and reads the pictures as narcissistic in form but not selfies in intent. That is a description of the body of work, not of a hang. But it was written by the gallery and was on the site while the show was up, and it is the nearest thing to a walk-through the record contains.

Two dates for one opening

This catalogue dates the show 30 Jun – 30 Jul 2016, with the contemporaneous sources. Every one of them — It's Nice That, Booooooom, the photography-now.com directory entry that still lists six of the gallery's exhibitions — gives 30 June to 30 July. L'Œil de la Photographie published its notice on 30 June 2016 and wrote that the gallery was inaugurating its summer exhibition that day. The gallery said the same thing itself: its news page, captured on 4 August 2016, announced the exhibition as 30 June to 30 July and the vernissage as Thursday 30 June from 18:00, and its exhibitions index, captured on 30 October 2016, printed the same run.

A second date is nevertheless in circulation. The Wix site that replaced those pages listed the show as Cute and Cruel – Izumi Miyazaki, June 29, 2016 — a single start date, one day before the run the gallery had announced while the work was on the wall. The same one-day offset appears in the Wix entries for WPG.04 and WPG.09. The catalogue prints the gallery's own dates in all three cases; the variance is set out source by source in the Record, and the reconciliation is entered in the corrections log. The documented opening was Thursday 30 June 2016.

The title, and the frame it put around the work

The exhibition title was not the name of a series. Miyazaki's pictures are titled individually and were made as a continuous stream rather than as bodies of work, so Cute and Cruel is a curatorial proposition — the gallery's reading of what the pictures do, offered as their heading. It has outlasted almost everything else about the show: the pictures are gone from the archive, the checklist was never published, and the two words are still in use, a decade later, as the wording of a citation on a Tokyo gallery's website.

The proposition is that the two registers are not in tension but in league. The pictures inventory decapitation, bisection and the body served as food, and they do it in even commercial light, in ordinary domestic interiors, with a bright palette and a young woman's entirely blank face at the centre. The cuteness is not applied over the cruelty; it is the mechanism that lets the cruelty be looked at. The gallery's announcement text, quoted at the time by It's Nice That, put the emphasis on the absent smile and read it as loneliness and as the difficulty a connected youth has in living in the actual world — a sentimental reading, and not the only available one, but the first published attempt to say what the deadpan was for. The argument from the pictures themselves is made separately, in the essay on the deadpan self-portraits. What belongs in the exhibition history is narrower: in the summer of 2016 a commercial gallery took a Tumblr feed, gave it a two-word critical frame, and the frame stuck.

The press file, June 2016 to July 2017

For a debut in a small capital, the coverage was disproportionate, and it was almost entirely non-Luxembourgish. It began before the doors opened: It's Nice That on 22 June, then Booooooom on 28 June, both English-language design-and-photography outlets with large followings, both naming the show and the gallery, the second crediting the first and linking to wildprojectgallery.com. On opening day, 30 June, L'Œil de la Photographie carried a short notice filed under Exhibitions that opens on the writer's own travels in Japan before arriving at the show. It is now readable only in preview behind the magazine's subscription wall.

CNN Style published the interview in August, after the show had closed, describing it as recently finished; that piece, with its eight gallery-credited images, is what carried the work furthest. Then the French-language critics arrived late and stayed longer than the exhibition had. Carnet d'Art reviewed on 21 September 2016 under a heading running from Magritte to Lynch and filed explicitly against the Luxembourg gallery — the most substantial critical text in the file: it records that she found photography at fifteen in a high-school camera club with her grandfather's film Pentax, that she said she was looking first of all to amuse herself, that she cited Miwa Yanagi's women with their identical expressions and absent personalities, and — the detail that dates the piece most sharply — that despite international success she had not decided to make art a profession and intended to enter the civil service in her home prefecture. Manifesto XXI followed on 24 January 2017 with a French essay on the deadpan surreal self-portraits, citing the gallery's own page on the artist as its source. Design Indaba ran a feature on 12 April 2017. Feature Shoot closed the wave on 31 July 2017, a year after the show, still describing the Luxembourg gallery as the artist's gallery and still going to it for facts.

Note what is missing from that list: Luxembourg. No review in the national press has surfaced in the record consulted for this file. The exhibition that gave the gallery its lasting international footprint appears to have passed without local notice — the inverse of Dark Celebration – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (25 Mar – 13 May 2017), which the daily press covered within the week and the foreign photography press mostly ignored.

The room in the program

The show sat almost exactly in the middle of the gallery's documented life. It followed the group presentation Did You Know Kazakhstan? – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (28 Apr – 11 Jun 2016), record WPG.06, and the gallery's outing to Art Paris at the Grand Palais that March, WPG.05. It was followed, after the summer, by Jardin Secret – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (16 Sep – 29 Oct 2016), the Vee Speers exhibition, record WPG.09. Seven more exhibitions followed before the program stopped in July 2017; neither they nor the six that preceded this one drew anything like the same attention. The full sequence is in the chronology.

The physical facts are modest and worth stating plainly, since they are the scale at which most photographic careers actually begin. The gallery was at 22, rue Louvigny in Luxembourg City, and the directory listing that recorded its program also recorded its hours: Wednesday to Friday, 14:30 to 18:30, and Saturday, 10:30 to 12:30 and 14:00 to 17:00. Four and a half open days a week, for four and a half weeks, in a country of fewer than 600,000 people. Everything else that happened to Cute and Cruel happened on other people's screens.

What outlived the gallery

Miyazaki's own year continued at speed. Stand-In – Art-U room, Tokyo (3 – 18 Dec 2016) gave her a first solo show in Japan, built as an installation around the reconstruction of a photo studio and the figure of the stand-in, the body that substitutes for an actor while the lighting is set. Three days after it closed her work was in Milan, among fourteen artists in Give Me Yesterday – Osservatorio, Fondazione Prada (21 Dec 2016 – 12 Mar 2017), the exhibition that opened that space. In the spring of 2018 the French photography press reported her showing simultaneously in Paris, Kyoto and Leipzig: There's no place like home ran that spring in a private first-floor space on rue Guénégaud in the 6th arrondissement, closing on 28 or 30 April depending on which French account is followed, while KYOTOGRAPHIE gave UP to ME a whole building in Gion. Where the record goes after that, and where it stops, is kept as an open file in Where is Izumi Miyazaki? The record since 2018.

The gallery did not continue at speed. Its documented program ended in July 2017; the site froze as a roster, then went dark; the web address stopped answering. What survived longest was the citation trail the exhibition had built. The Tokyo gallery's page for Stand-In still carries, in its artist note, a reference reading Cute & Cruel that resolves to a Wild Project Gallery page no archive ever captured — a second Miyazaki page, numbered in sequence with the artist page, preserved in no capture and surviving now only as an address in someone else's footnote. That footnote is the sole evidence located here that the page existed at all.

Which is the argument for this page. An exhibition of eleven photographs by an art-school graduate of twenty-one or twenty-two, for four and a half weeks, in the summer of 2016, is the kind of event the art record ordinarily loses: no catalogue, no museum registrar, no images left in the archive. It is also, on the evidence of a press file that ran from June 2016 to July 2017 and citations still standing a decade later, the best-remembered thing that ever happened at 22, rue Louvigny. Corrections and documented additions — an installation photograph, a price list, a checklist, a press cutting from Luxembourg — are invited through the contact form; the corrections page carries the log of changes to the file.