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Black, White, and Uncanny: Miwa Yanagis Fairy Tale

Linda Nochlin
If there is a single thread tying together the highly variable stylistic strands in the work of the young
Japanese artist Miwa Yanagi since the appearance of her memorable series Elevator Girls in 1998, it is its
unremitting concentration on women and their situation. The Elevator Girls series, staged in glowing
Technicolor, grew out of performance and involved female models standing or sprawling in exaggeratedly
postmodern settings enhanced by elevators, escalators, and other hoked-up appurtenances of luxe cosmopolitan consumption. Carefully groomed women impersonated the Barbie-like hostesses paid to take
care of visitors to Japanese department stores. Digitalized to increase the uneasy sense of the vast, depersonalized commercial spaces of international consumerismPascals memorable Le silence de ces espaces infinis meffraie might serve as their logothe series nevertheless focused on the Japanese particularism of the black-haired, red-uniformed protagonists, who stand rigidly at attention or fall pathetically in
dainty heaps on the tilting pavements.
Despite Yanagis critical attitude toward contemporary social mores embodied in these prints, they
clearly reject the documentary sensibility associated with traditional photography of social critique.
Artifice, demonstrated artifice, is the name of the game, and revealing the devicemaking evident the
constructed nature of the photographic environmentis a prime strategy of her project, and remains so in
all her work.
Yanagis next series, My Grandmothers, begun in 2000, is both more dynamic in style and less pessimistic in sentiment than Elevator Girls, although equally self-conscious in its strategies. Here she used her
models conceptions of what they might be doing and how they might be looking in fifty years as the basis
of a series that posits old age as a site of dramatic feminine liberation. Yuka, the most memorable image of
the series, has become a poster girl for the joys of (imaginary, of course) female postmenopausal self-determination and pleasure. Here, the heroine, her ostentatiously dyed red hair streaming in the wind behind
her, opens her mouth in a cry of triumphant exultation as she speeds past the Golden Gate bridge in the
sidecar of her much younger and much dimmer boy toys motorcycle. Still other works from this series, all
modeled by much younger women in masks and makeup, represent an embracing lesbian couple, an elegant older woman traveling first-class in a luxurious airplane, and still another steering her own glider with
great self-assurance. Perhaps Yanagi is suggesting that for women, always remaking their appearances to
accord with social expectations in their youth, old age itself is a kind of benign disguise, the open sesame
to a magic kingdom of self-determination.
Between 2003 and 2006, Yanagi created her most recent series, a group of highly finished black-andwhite photographs, square in format, dealing, for the most part, with the narratives of traditional Western

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fairy tales.1 The Fairy Tale series includes many grandmothers, too, or rather, young girls disguised as
grandmothers; the whole series is staged by children en travesti. But the Fairy Tale old women are hardly
the benign and self-determining senior powerhouses-of-the-future envisioned in Yanagis earlier series:
on the contrary, they are a sinister lot of old crones, ruthless and scary hags, going far beyond the boundaries of decorum established by traditional illustrations of the genre in their equivocal grotesquery.
Included in the core of the Fairy Tale photographs are two images of Erendira, not a traditional fairy-tale
girl at all, but the inspiration of the series as a whole, as she appeared in Gabriel Garca Mrquezs eccentric short story, itself inspired by traditional folklore, The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erndira
and Her Heartless Grandmother. 2
I would first like to make some remarks about the series as a whole, then focus on some individual images, and finally locate this group of works within the larger context of recent fairy-tale investigation by
scholars and fairy-tale representation by contemporary women artists, concentrating particularly on a
single tale, Little Red Riding Hood.
The Fairy Tale series as a whole is calculated to construct an aura of the Uncanny, both in its formal
structure and in its willed perversion of the moral edification of the familiar nineteenth-century renditions
of this time-honored folk genre in the hands of Grimm or Andersen, not to speak of the totally kitchified
and sugarcoated versions offered by Hollywood in the form of the Disney epics. Here, in Yanagis images,
within the shadowy, spatially ambiguous, at times indecipherable stage sets constructed by Yanagi for the
playing out of her perverse mini-dramas, the figures glow with a sinister pallor: spooky illumination and its
natural sources are foregroundedcandles, daylight, firelightand youth and age, the latter signified by
scary masks worn by equally youthful figures, battle it out for empowerment. I could not help but think of
the masks of Noh theater in relation to Yanagis practice.
The deliberate choice of black-and-white film is, of course, highly meaningful today, when much largescale constructed or staged art photography is recorded in color film.3 In the case of the Fairy Tale images, black-and-white serves several functions. First, it suggests the inwardness of these bizarre interchanges, the fact that they take place in the realm of the artists and the viewers imagination; in short, that they
are fantasy images, connected with the strange displacements and condensations of the dream world
rather than with everyday life. We are, after all, said to dream in black-and-white. In a sense, too, the
reversion to black-and-white reduces the indexicality of these images: these days, we unconsciously
expect reality to produce its trace in full color for full veracity. Yet at the same time, black-and-white may
allude to the historical past of fairy-tale illustration, in particular to some of the best known and most

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highly charged illustrations of the nineteenth century, the marvelous lithographs of Gustave Dor for
Little Red Riding Hood, which expose, albeit without premeditation, the sexual subtext of the moralistic good-girl story.
Each individual print in Yanagis series recasts and reinterprets a familiar tale in a highly idiosyncratic
way. In Snow White, the protagonist and the wicked stepmothermirror images of each otherconfront
each other in an arm wrestle for the fatal apple, a large, plastic number, as phony as the realistic old-hag
mask sported by Snow Whites wrinkly opponent. Come on, eat up, suggests the text on the facing page.
No thank you, Snow White replies like a polite little girl. Then have half with me. The stepmother here
is illogically conciliatory, thereby presumably killing off both of them. There are simply times, Yanagi suggests, when compromise wont work.
In Yanagis revisionist version of the Snow White tale, our heroine has wrestled the authority figure
the Bad Fairy? Grandma? A combination of both?to the floor in a multiwindowed room filled with the
appurtenances of spinning, a traditional occupation of the good woman: piles of uncarded wool, spools of
yarn, a phallic distaff prominent in the foreground and another, discarded, on the floor to the right. Youth
decidedly has the upper hand in this wrestling match of the generations, and the accompanying text bears
out this message. Time for bed. I am not sleepy. It is time to sleep. Then you sleep first,
Grandma.
One of the most memorable of the Fairy Tale images is a close-up portrait of Gretel, the heroine of
Hansel and Gretel. Significantly, Brother Hansel is missing: there is simply no place for the male sex in
this revisionist charade of the traditional tale. The young girl playing Gretel lies on a rug, leaning toward
the spectator, her face illuminated by the light of a single candle. She gnaws tentatively on the desiccated
finger of a withered arm thrust through the chalkline bars indicating an adjacent cage. Clearly, the wicked
old witch does not have the upper hand in Yanagis recasting of the story. Who is supposed to be eating
whom? The side panel reinforces the disturbing ambiguity of the image.
You look like a dry twig. Why dont you fatten up?
So I will never be eaten by you.
Hasnt Yanagi reversed the parts of Gretel and the witch? Wasnt it Gretel, in the traditional story, who
cleverly proferred a chicken claw instead of her arm to the witch when the latter demanded to see if her
victim was plump enough for consumption? Who is keeping whom captive in Yanagis version? Is youth
getting the better of age once more? Yet surely, Yanagis Gretel, if dominant, doesnt look very happy.

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Gustave Dor Little Red Riding Hood, from Charles Perraults Les contes (Paris, 1862).

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This ambiguity, if not actual role reversal, continues in the most parodic staging of the series, Cinderella.
Set in a nocturnal chamber before a blazing fireplace filled with the requisite cindersCinderella/cinders,
get it?the tableau features two wistful, small-footed sisters to the left and a decidedly large-footed,
boyish Cinderella to the right, a gangly teenager who throws herself back into the arms of a masked
older character, her wicked stepmother, also barefooted, holding a candle. This unstably posed heroine, her jaunty legs revealed by the firelight gleaming through her transparent skirt, seems to be muttering
an aside to her grotesque partner: Compared to your huge feet, look how dainty ours appear. Perhaps
the underlying message here is that sisters, even evil stepsisters, should stick together and resist the
unreasonable demands of their elderly caretaker. Once more, the divisions are generational and Yanagi
leaves the interpretation open to viewers.
The Fairy Tale photographs, powerful, puzzling, phantasmagoric, and ultimately highly disturbing,
although meaningful in themselves, appear even more provocative when examined both within the context of recent investigations of the fairy-tale genre outside the realm of visual representation, within the
disciplines of psychoanalysis, anthropology, and literary studies, where there has been a proliferation of
what one might call Fairy Tale Studies, as well as within the framework of fairy-tale images by other contemporary women artists. Examination of a fairy tale favored by women artists and pictured by Yanagi
herself, Little Red Riding Hood, is particularly apposite for this purpose.
As Jack Zipes, professor of German and doyen of contemporary fairy-tale studies, has pointed out, the fairy
tale has the potentiality for spearheading a radical reexamination of dominant cultural values at the same time
that it serves, in its standard nineteenth- and twentieth-century versions, to maintain the social order by punishing deviation.4 Feminist criticism in particular, has revealed both the conscious and unconscious assumptions
about female passivity, helplessness, and reliance on masculine assistance implicit and explicit to the plots of
such old favorites as Cinderella, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood. The latter tale has attracted the
particular attention of scholars of folklore, literary scholars, and, last but not least, women artists.5
In a recent article, Visualising Little Red Riding Hood, Sarah Bonner sets the stage for a full-scale
examination of women artists varied approaches to this fairy-tale theme. At the outset, she declares: In
recent years contemporary artists have been appropriating and re-inventing traditional fairy tales.
Subverting and interrogating received meanings, artists are challenging the traditional parameters of
tales which convey ideas of gender role and racial identity. The fairy tale is being translated from literary
text into visual culture. The artists recoding the tales address shifts in cultural attitude, engaging predominantly with issues of identity and discrimination . . . The text and image are intimately related, yet I

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propose that the image contains qualities that release interpretation from the strictures of tradition,
making them more relevant and immediate in contemporary society.6 There are a plethora of Red Riding
Hood illustrations, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing more or less unabated until the
present day, a history made partially available in a rather helter-skelter fashion by reproductions in several publications7 and easily viewable by Googling Little Red Riding Hood images online. These include
a series of brilliant lithographs by Dor, drawings by Walter Crane, and myriad plates illustrating various
episodesRed Riding Hood Meeting the Wolf, the Wolf in Bed, the Wolf Captured by the Brave Huntsman
are favoritesby many little-known or anonymous draftsmen. Yet it is far more interesting to situate
Miwa Yanagis work, and in particular her version of the Red Riding Hood theme, within the context of
contemporary art than simply to see it as part of a historical continuum. I have chosen to make a comparative examination of two very different contemporary interpretations of the theme by women artists:
Paula Regos Little Red Riding Hood Suite, six images in pastel, executed in 2003, and Kiki Smiths complex
reinvention of the raw materials of the tale, taking inspiration from recent literary subversions of the
tale that promote the complicity of the girl and wolf, in a cultural climate that is concerned with alienation and difference. 8
Regos series of six pastels is relatively straightforward, if quirky. The artist hews closely to the traditional story, beginning with Red Riding Hood sent off to visit her grandmother, but violently disrupts and
confounds the traditional narrative with dark irony in which her feminist revisionism shines forth with sardonic insistence. In plate 4, we meet the Wolf, a fading hipster clad in skimpy, figure-revealing exercise
clothes, the sort of aging male narcissist one would dread running into at a cocktail party. In plate 3, The
Wolf Chats Up Red Riding Hood, we have our protagonist sitting with the Wolf and staring up at his laughably inadequate Grandma disguise, as he stares down at her with an unpleasantly possessive leer. We now
fast-forward to plate 5, Mother Takes Revenge, in which the maternal figure, armed with a pitchfork, spears
the bloated, postprandial Wolf, who lies on her daughters abandoned red cloak after eating her and presumably her grandmother as well. Mother obviously doesnt need the help of the traditional woodcutter
or any other male do-gooder, thank you very much. In the final frame, Mother Wears the Wolfs Pelt, Red
Riding Hoods mother, clad in a chic red suit and matching hat, makes a solo appearance, swathed in her
cherished wolf-skin stole. She crosses her excellent legs and looks up to the right slyly, as though flirting
with an invisible figure. Throughout, Rego insists on the power, autonomy, and sexual viability of the
mature female ego, to which both the little girl and her grandmother are, so to speak, sacrificed. The male
seducer is, of course, utterly defeated.

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Left: Paula RegoThe Wolf Chats Up Red Riding Hood, 2003.

Right: Paula Rego Mother Takes Revenge, 2003.

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Nothing could be more different from Regos sardonic narrative of empowerment through female
agency than Kiki Smiths variegated group of variations on the Red Riding Hood theme. There is no overt
violence in Smiths multiple interpretations of the tale. Rather, the artist envisions complicity between
girl and wolf, in that both are positioned as outsiders, nonconformists. In one statue, Daughter (1999), the
red-cloaked figure of the young girl, immediately associated with the classical Red Riding Hood, confounds such simple identification by sprouting a beard, morphologically identifying with her traditional
predator and suggesting some of the uncanny, antisocial outsiderness of the werewolf as well. In another,
a bronze work titled Rapture (2001), a full-grown, mature woman steps forth confidently from the split
belly of the wolf, lying recumbent on the floor beneath her. Gender identify itself is confounded, for the
paradigmatically male wolf of tradition has morphed into a maternal figure. Or perhaps he has remained
male and the woman has simply erupted from his carcass.
Miwa Yanagi, in her revision of the Red Riding Hood story, chooses neither alternative: neither violent
destruction nor accepting complicity with the wolf. The Red Riding Hood image from the Fairy Tale series is
a strange one, at first glance repellent and frightening. We are looking down, as from a great height, at a
gigantic, riven wolf skin, clotted with unspecified muck, from whose open belly emerge two figures: Little
Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, wrapped in each others arms, their faces framed by the mighty
back paws of the fallen beast. Their faces and bodies are stained with unspecified dark fluid, their expressions noncommittal. The accompanying text confirms their newfound status: The two, rescued from the
wolfs stomach, were newly born twins. The little girl and her grandmother, old and young women, figured as competing, often physically struggling entities in many of Yanagis other prints from the Fairy Tale
series, are here seen as compassionate equals, redeemed to live anew in companionship. On closer inspection, it would seem that the wolf skin that shelters them was not violently cut apart by a woodsmans axe
or any other weapon, but rather was zipped open like a sleeping bag. In fact, that is what it is in this contemporary version of the tale: a zippered, cuddly, if somewhat equivocal wolf-skin sleeping bag, not the
corpse of a ravening monster at all.
Things are often not what they seem in Yanagis evocative transformation of traditional fairy tales.
Using the framework of the time-honored coming-of-age stories for young women as a starting point, the
artist completely dislocates and subverts the meanings of her texts, encouraging girlish rebellion against
the sinister forces of a decrepit authority that would keep her instincts repressed, her agency unexercised.
Within the gloomy, ill-lit purlieus of a factitious unconscious, a shadowy and ambiguous dream world,
Yanagi summons her forces and, on the whole, overcomes the enemy. Only through rebirth, a sea change

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Left: Kiki Smith Daughter, 1999.

Right: Kiki Smith, Wolf, 2001.

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wrought within the belly of the beast, can reconciliation be achieved, and if the expression of the little girl
inside the charmed circle is any indication, this reconciliation is, at best, provisional.

The series of photographs exhibited and then published by Yanagi under the title Fairy Tale: Strange Stories of Women Young and Old

(Kyoto: Seigensha, 2007) includes other material as well. I will be focusing on the twelve central images in the series referencing the wellknown fairy tales of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, et al. It is in a sense ironic that the Japanese artist
Miwa Yanagi concerns herself with the European fairy tale, whereas it was a Westerner, Lafcadio Hearn, who rescued the Japanese fairy
tale from oblivion early in the twentieth century. Hearn later adopted Japanese identity.
2

Atsuo Yasuda, Miwa Yanagi: The Incredible Tale of the Innocent Old Lady and the Heartless Young Girl (Tokyo: Hara Museum of Contemporary

Art, 2005), p. 7.
3

This is not always the case. See, for example, the recent show of Jeff Wall at White Cube, Picadilly. There are many other exceptions, but

I believe that most of them exclude the representation of the human figure. Wall is concerned mainly with slum architecture and urban
decay.
4

See Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk & Fairy Tales, rev. ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002).

The literature on Little Red Riding Hood is extensive. I can only suggest some of the major contributions, many of them gathered in

compendia of various authors research and interpretation: see Alan Dundes, ed., Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1989), and Jack Zipes, ed., The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1993). The
latter volume contains poetry and prose on the subject; some of the more recent contributions have a decided feminist edge, and the
prologue, Framing Little Red Riding Hood, is invaluable. Zipes returns to the theme in A Second Gaze at Little Red Riding Hoods Trials
and Tribulations, The Lion and the Unicorn 78 (198384), pp. 78109. The wide-ranging study by Catherine Orenstein, Little Red Riding
Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (New York: Basic Books, 2002), has an up-to-date bibliography.
6

Sarah Bonner, Visualising Little Red Riding Hood, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english/graduate/issue/2/sarah.htm, accessed on November

15, 2007.

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See, for instance, the volumes by Zipes and Orenstein cited in note 5.

Bonner, Visualising Little Red Riding Hood.

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