Lieko Shiga: destruction and reconciliation.

orn in Okazaki, Japan — Shiga’s photography career began without photography at all. Instead as a teenager she thought about nothing other than dance. She studied classical ballet until one day her physical development prevented her from carrying in. Shiga’s means for physical self-expression had been taken away from her — at the height of her ability’s. In many ways, Shiga’s use of the camera resembles that of a limb, flaunting it flamboyantly and with style, to express that which she no longer can with ballet. That being said, Shiga’s seems to have departed from those days, with her oeuvre contains little of the elegance of ballet… what we are presented with is much more visceral, almost violent. <img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:700/1*IRoeOWb9ufznU_H3hbKUDw.jpeg" style="height:467px; width:700px" /> Lieko Shiga, (2019) “Human Spring” Shiga said that producing a physical image she could hold was both “shocking and pleasurable” — an expression so attached to oneself, but at the same time inherently removed from the body, and she “found that separation extremely sensual”. For Shiga, the camera is a portal to a world the way only she can see it, one revealed through the detached physicality only the tactile nature of the photography can offer. This paradoxical relationship was to be the perfect means to realise the phantasmagoria of her foreign dream-scapes. Just like dance though, Shiga orchestrates her on-location photography through an authentic engagement with human experience, dealing with subjects she holds in close proximity before engaging in means of physical abstraction — often in the darkroom, to further question her relationship to the medium and the world she inhabits. <a href="https://medium.com/@SILVERPLUS/through-this-artists-destruction-she-gained-everything-7450b372cfa3">Visit Now</a>