Open A Memory Box

A visit to the Aiko Miyanaga’s installation at the Mizuma Art Gallery near Nakameguro Station is a metaphor for recalling a treasured memory. Located on the second floor of a forgotten building, you are greeted by a short narrow hallway. At the opposite end is the entrance to the gallery – a door with a small window and a message that invites you to “open the chest.” What chest? As you peek through the window, an ancient, coffin-sized chest is spotlighted against a black background. From a crack in the top and from beneath the lid of the chest, a white glow invites…

If you are lucky, you will be the only one in the room as you step into the black room. And you will be alone to face a childhood memory as you open the chest – a stuffed animal, literally crystallized in the moment. A pile of the toy blocks is also part of the treasure, and some have also transformed into what looks like ice. Not all though; many still remain, their color darkened, dirtied. Through gaps between the blocks, as you bend down closer to examine the collage, you see tiny crystal chairs living, dwelling inside the pile.

Return to this memory a week later. What seemed frozen in the moment is now covered in a dust or frost-like material. Yet another week later, the small delicate sculptures of chairs are crumbling…nothing is constant, not even memory.


Sculpture using a material called naphthalene results in, using Miyanaga’s own words, artworks that “shift not as fast as melting ice, or as slowly as a weathering Greek sculpture”. The naphthalene sculptures look like glass or ice, but over time, as it sublimes (turns from solid to vapor form), the surface begins to frost over. More fragile objects, such as the tiny chairs, begin to crumble in a few weeks. In this substance, commonly used to create mothballs, Miyanaga has found a vehicle for producing an apt metaphor for memory – frozen at any single moment, but never the same each time it is revisited.

But mothballs are, of course, toxic, meant to kill insect larvae as the vapor it gives off builds up in a closed drawer. Miyanaga’s work, including the collage in the chest, is always concealed in an acrylic case – on one hand, transforming memory into a museum object to be valued and protected, and on the other, protecting its audience from an agent of harm. Some memories, though treasured, are perhaps best left closed…