In a magical subterranean installation at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) San Francisco curated by Alison Gass, audiences are immersed in Osaka-born/Berkeley-based Masako Miki’s syncretic project that knits together aspects of Japanese folklore, modernist surrealism, and mid-century design.
Thirty-four of Miki’s colorful wool-felted abstract sculptures are displayed in the dramatically darkened ICA space, sparely illuminated with spotlights like a film-noir set—bold and powerful. Several forms seen first in Miki’s 2019 breakout exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive reappear here, including a gray-hued one-eyed goblin, a couple of polka-dot-spotted umbrella ghosts, and a suspended pair of bright red lips. But virtually everything exhibited is newly made, and there are plenty of unfamiliar forms, installed in isolation or in clusters and set against black walls featuring original imagery drawn from Miki’s paintings of starry night skies.
The exhibition is entitled Midnight March and is envisioned as a Hyakki Yagyō—the nocturnal parade of supernatural creatures drawn from Shinto folklore that include shape-shifting yokai. Yokai have been a classical subject of grotesque figuration in Japanese art for centuries—and have appeared in the work of Japanese American artists in California since Toshio Aoki (1854–1912) during the late nineteenth-century West’s fascination with Japonisme.1
This iconography resurfaces regularly in Japan. Contemporary examples include the famously extravagant monstrosities of Takashi Murakami and recent works by Tenmyouya Hisashi, whose folding pop-up paper attachments on antique screens reference popular classical illustrations by Toriyama Sekien (1712–1788).
We read in the helpful exhibition guide that this iconography was once weaponized as propaganda. But while the current exhibition is scaffolded in ancient folklore, Miki’s goal is conceptual. She breaks in important ways with the traditionally monstrous depictions of yokai and frightening stories associated with the Hyakki Yagyō that conjure nightmares of abduction.
Her softly rounded shapes are decidedly nonthreatening, rendered instead cheerful and fuzzy—kid-friendly, even funny—because of their brightly hued (if time-intensive) wool felting. In interviews, Miki has stated that her intention for exploring ambiguous metamorphic form is to highlight the “shape-shifting” nature of the yokai as a metaphor which she relates to “blowing the boundaries” with an embrace of nonbinary identity.
The exhibition also includes three of Miki’s works on paper painted in watercolor and ink and three works of cast-bronze sculpture. Both incorporate more naturalistic figurative imagery, including cats, dogs, birds, mushrooms, and fans that further explore a folk-art sensibility; the paintings even suggest Mexican San Pablito Otomi embroidery.
The three bronzes are provocatively and poetically installed in a former bank vault space at the ICA, now lined with broken and empty safety deposit boxes, used as a gallery for the first time. This juxtaposition is intended to point to Miki’s interest in shapeshifters called Tsukumogami that represent reanimated discarded objects and tools.
Miki’s use of wool felting imbues the works with a craft aesthetic that evokes stenciling, needlepoint, and crewel. More generally, her brightly hued works convey a strong message of design, underscoring a parallel source in the moment of mid-century exploration of biomorphic form.
Many of the felted sculptures are supported on thin, conical furniture legs, and some recall the spindly supports of Noguchi’s 1950s Akari lamps with their often unconventionally shaped lanterns. Her paintings’ horror vacui repetition of forms is reminiscent of the textile patterning from the same period.
But Miki also addresses the legacy of two postwar modernist giants. She has noted her admiration for the work of Ruth Asawa’s globular suspended wire sculpture, which was in part inspired by Mexican wire-basket weaving, and Isamu Noguchi’s playscapes, which were conceived for a multigenerational audience.
Miki’s work has been exhibited widely at Bay Area venues including SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and ICA San Jose—all since the show at BAMPFA (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive)—and as public art at Uber Headquarters and along the Minna-Natoma art corridor.
What makes this exhibition distinctive and valuable is its professional breadth and enveloping scale. Because the world can feel awash with pop cultural kami (Pokémon marketers have even developed a “Midsummer Night March” that links to plush merchandise2), and because Miki recently designed windows for Hermès in Ginza, one might wonder if her sculpture is maybe just too easy to like.
Not a problem. Hers is a fully developed singular vision that engages in rich dialog with a complex network that includes eclectic international and regional art-historical perspectives. And she has deflected criticism that her work is merely “cute” by explaining that the original meaning of the related Japanese term kawaii implies an adoring compassion that is nuanced with sadness.3
Beyond those artists and traditions already named, Masako Miki’s night parade elegantly summons multiple past and present spirits from the global world of art and design, sparking some unexpected interior conversations in the empty vaults and mysterious and mesmerizing lower-level galleries of the ICA Cube.
And at the same time, it prods her audiences to imagine these human-scale hungry ghosts sneaking out of the confines of their confined gallery installation, looking for food and fun, meeting up with other mythic creatures that sometimes are found prowling the nearby streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Notes:
1. An example of Toshio Aoki’s yokai trampled by hope can be seen here (Smart Museum of Art).
2. The Pokemon night march is advertised here (Nintendo Soup).
3. See Qingyuan Deng’s interview with the artist in “Flaunt,” Via Issue 194, Close Encounters.
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Masako Miki’s Midnight March is on view through Dec. 7, 2025 at the Institute for Contemporary Art at 345 Montgomery St. in San Francisco. Learn more.
*This article was originally published in the Nichi Bei News on September 25, 2025.
© 2025 Mark Dean Johnson, Patricia Wakida, NIchi Bei News
