Mizuki Nishiyama is a London-based, mixed-Japanese artist who creates raw and confrontational artworks spanning paintings, sculptures, tapestries, poetry, and performances that explore the fragile human condition.
Nishiyama notably conducts dialogues and critiques the socio-politics of the female experience by incorporating the artist's Japanese paternal soil, which has buried her military ancestors since the 1400s, into her works, where she reevaluates ancestry, patriarchy, and time. Exploring ideas of purity, femininity, Shintoism, and trauma; the artist utilises the elements of the world, and responds to what it means to be a woman today. The premise of the work begins with soil that the artist excavated from her paternal land in Japan; which dates back to the 1400s where her military ancestors (including members who committed Seppuku ritual suicides), and members that shaped Shintoism (Yoshida family; constructing the foundation of purification within the religion). In the paintings, Nishiyama incorporates the same soil as well as a deliberate knife cutting technique to slice through viscous oil pigments on canvas to depict violence and tranquility. Embracing deeply personal experiences to craft each artwork, the artist’s ongoing relationship with reproductive health and trauma has greatly influenced her practice and fueled her to confront vulnerability, fragility and the human condition. Creating is a chaotic yet meditative process for Nishiyama that allows her to make sense of the more tempestuous periods in life as well as continue to merge interdisciplinary thoughts and mediums to visualize the contemporary experience. As a mixed-Japanese artist, Nishiyama draws inspiration from the East and West. Bridging her Hong Kong, Japanese and Italian cultural heritages.