“With the world going through all these momentous changes, we’ve experienced how humble, yet precious, even miraculous, this reality is in the everyday, so fragile like sand escaping through our fingers.”
— NINAGAWA Mika
NINAGAWA Mika builds worlds bursting with colour and emotion. Her photographs of blooming flowers, shimmering goldfish, water, city nights and portraits dissolve the boundary between the real and the imagined.
NINAGAWA creates a fluid, dream-like universe brimming with expressionist, intensely-coloured images of domesticated aquatic life and captures the fleeting beauty of the springtime cherry blossom in Japan, a subject that has become one of the artist's most recognisable motifs.
Bridging art, fashion and pop culture, NINAGAWA’s photographs will transform Soho Photography Quarter into a place of both spectacle and reflection.
See more of NINAGAWA’s photographs in our Summer exhibition, Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now, on show at The Photographers’ Gallery from 24 June until 27 September 2026.
Get to know NINAGAWA Mika
Although primarily a photographer, Mika Ninagawa is a multidisciplinary artist who also works extensively in film, video and spatial installations. She is the recipient of numerous photography awards, including the prestigious Kimura Ihei Award. A book of her photographs was published by Rizzoli New York in 2010. She has directed five feature films, including Helter-Skelter (2012) and Diner (2019), and the Netflix original drama
FOLLOWERS (2020). She has published more than 120 books of photographs, held or participated in over 150 solo exhibitions and 130 group exhibitions, and continues to present her work enthusiastically in Japan and abroad. Exhibitions include: Mika Ninagawa: Eternity in a Moment (TOKYO NODE, 2023/2024); NINAGAWA Mika with EiM: Lights of the beyond, Shadows of this world (Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art, 2025). Three volumes of her latest photo collection series, Eternity in a Moment, were published in October 2024.
