Mizuki Nishiyama 西山瑞貴

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 re-evaluates 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).