Mika Ninagawa with EiM · Alive with Shadows

Le Grand Palais presents an exhibition by Mika Ninagawa, a prominent figure in Japanese visual arts, with her collective of associated creators EiM. Through photographs, videos and installations, her universe unfolds on a large scale, inviting the viewer to cross the thresholds of a sensitive world. Born in Tokyo in 1972, Mika Ninagawa weaves a body of work at the crossroads of contemporary imagination and Japanese aesthetic memory. In her images, nature emerges where you would not expect it, captured in the heart of urban turbulence or carefully framed in spaces shaped by human hands. Gardens, bouquets, artificial flowers, radiant petals, suspended butterflies, drifting goldfish and fragments of cities form a fragile constellation, in which each motif becomes the mirror of a beauty doomed to disappear.

From Tokyo to Taipei, from Venice to Rouen, her universe that blends photography, cinema, video and installation is presented in international institutions. In France, her work has notably included Florae for Van Cleef & Arpels (2021), at the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles (2024) and within Normandie Impressioniste (2026).

For Mika Ninagawa, the brilliance of beauty is inseparable from its loss, and color, vibrant, carries within it a soft, almost whispered melancholy. To photograph, then, is to hold back what escapes, to offer the eye the illusion of a moment preserved. But her work is not limited to still images. With her collective of associated creators EiM (Eternity in a Moment), she shapes lush, enveloping and almost unreal environments. These spaces, heirs of a sensitivity nourished by the theatre she discovered in childhood through her father, the stage director Yukio Ninagawa, invite viewers to enter a vivid, sensory experience.

If her compositions burst with saturated and contrasted colors, an 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 no less luminous. Alive with Shadows (Vivre avec nos ombres) evokes the shadows that inhabit us and shape, as much as light, our way of being in the world: "I know that everything has an end. And it is precisely because I am aware of this finitude that I wish to continue giving life to these fleeting, yet miraculous moments."

Mika Ninagawa

Commissariat
Lena Fritsch - independent curator, author, art historian

Scénographie : Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects

Autres informations

À propos de Mika Ninagawa et EiM

Mika Ninagawa

Artist of multidisciplinary practice, Mika Ninagawa is renowned particularly in photography and also creates films, videos and installations. From the outset, she has won photography prizes, including the Ihei Kimura Award at the age of 28. In 2010, she published a photography book with Rizzoli New York. In Japan, her solo exhibitions are regularly presented in institutions: Tokyo Node, Kyocera Museum of Art in Kyoto. Internationally, her work has been shown notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, the Beijing Times Art Museum, and Palazzo Bollani in Venice.

In France, her project Florae for Van Cleef & Arpels was presented in 2021. She participated in the 2024 exhibition I’m So Happy You Are Here at the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles. In 2026, she was invited to Normandie Impressioniste for a photography exhibition and a projection mapping on the façade of Rouen Cathedral.

EiM (Eternity in a Moment)

EiM is a creative team founded in 2022 by Mika Ninagawa, the scientist and artistic director Hiroaki Miyata, the production director Enzo, the creative director Isao Kuwana, the lighting director Koshiro Ueno and other collaborators. The team is a diverse and flexible unit for each of its projects.