Alive with Shadows de Mika Ninagawa au Grand Palais

This winter the Grand Palais presents an exhibition never before staged in Europe by Mika Ninagawa, a leading figure in Japanese visual arts. Through photographs, videos and installations, her universe unfolds on a grand scale, inviting the gaze to cross the thresholds of a world of intense sensitivity.

Prepare to be dazzled! Mika Ninagawa, a winner of the most prestigious photography awards, sets up her base in Paris this winter with a body of 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 tumult or carefully framed within spaces shaped by the human hand. Gardens, bouquets, artificial flowers, dazzling petals, suspended butterflies, drifting goldfish and fragments of cities compose a fragile constellation, in which each motif becomes the mirror of a beauty destined to vanish.

Together with EiM (Eternity in a Moment), the collective of associated creators she works with, she shapes lush, enveloping and almost unreal environments. These spaces, heirs to a sensibility nurtured by the theatre she discovered in childhood through her father, the stage director Yukio Ninagawa, invite you to step into a living, sensory and deeply immersive experience. It is no longer simply about looking, but about feeling and moving through, as in a meditation.

While 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, more fragile perhaps, but just as luminous. Alive with Shadows ("Living with Our Shadows") evokes the shadows that dwell within us and shape, as much as light does, the way we exist in the world.