Attention, eyes! Mika Ninagawa, laureate of the most prestigious photography prizes, sets up her cases in Paris this winter with her work at the crossroads of contemporary imagination and Japanese aesthetic memory. In her images, nature emerges where one least expects it, captured at the heart of urban turmoil or carefully framed in spaces shaped by the human hand. Gardens, bouquets, artificial flowers, dazzling petals, suspended butterflies, goldfish adrift and fragments of cities compose a fragile constellation in which each motif becomes the mirror of a beauty destined to vanish.
With her associated creative collective EiM (Eternity in a Moment), she shapes lush, enveloping and almost unreal environments. These spaces, heirs to a sensibility nourished by the theatre she discovered in childhood through her father, the stage director Yukio Ninagawa, invite you to enter a living, sensory, deeply immersive experience. It is no longer only a matter of seeing but of feeling and passing through, like a meditation.
If her compositions burst with saturated, contrasting colours, the immediate signature of her visual language, this exhibition also reveals more intimate nuances, more secret breaths of her work. Another voice can be heard there, perhaps more fragile, but just as luminous. Alive with Shadows ("Vivre avec nos ombres") evokes the shadows that inhabit us and shape, as much as light does, our way of being in the world.