Utsukushiki Okori: Seeing Red in Ninagawa Mika’s Cinema of Extremes
Museum Of Anthropology (MOA) Visual + Material Culture Seminar Series – Fall 2020
With Speaker Professor Colleen Laird
(Assistant Professor of Japanese Film and Popular Culture, Department of Asian Studies, UBC)
One of Japan’s most celebrated commercial fashion photographers, Ninagawa Mika is an acclaimed “girly” visual artist and a director of films, music videos, and a Netflix Original series. She is immensely popular, particularly with female-identifying audiences. She features so-called “bad girl” protagonists and recruits notoriously “bad girl” celebrities to craft a vision of extravagance and a vision of extremes, all largely draped in red, which she deems to be “the colour of passion, the colour of blood, the colour of everything.” This seminar invites you into Ninagawa’s extravagant, scopophilic visual world, one in which the act of looking is one of power, one of passion and desire, one of projection, reflection, connection, objectification, and ustukushiki okori—“beautiful rage.”
