Into the Din: Miho Tanaka
Into the Din, curated by IKT Member Marta Ferrara, explores the delicate, patient practice of Japanese artist Miho Tanaka, who lives and works in Naples. Through sculpture, assemblage, and weaving, Tanaka reflects on themes of repetition, care, and transformation. Her works incorporate found urban fragments, stone, and thread, revealing the poetry of discarded materials. A quiet presence in the city’s chaos, Tanaka invites viewers to experience slowness and attentiveness. The exhibition highlights her evolving dialogue between Japanese roots and Western landscapes, bridging cultures through gesture and material memory.
The exhibition is on view until July 23, 2025, at the Andrea Nuovo Home Gallery, located at Via Monte di Dio 61, Naples (Italy). Opening Hours: Tuesday to Friday: 10:30 AM–1:00 PM and 4:30 PM–7:00 PM / Saturday: by appointment only.
Into the Din. Of discard and repetition in the artistic practice of Miho Tanaka
By Marta Ferrara
But the city does not tell its past, it contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, in the grilles of the windows, in the handrails of the stairs, in the antennas of the lightning rods, in the flagpoles, each segment in turn marked with scratches, serrations, carvings, commas.
I. Calvino, Invisible cities, 1972
Din: English noun.
Roughly translatable as din: a loud, unpleasant, prolonged noise.
Or a verb: to instill, to inculcate, to hammer.
To make (someone) learn or remember an idea through constant repetition.
A cup, a teaspoon, a small dinner plate and a soup plate. Miho keeps this in the cupboard of this sunny house. A fork, a spoon and a knife. Just this. It makes me smile, almost embarrassed, thinking of the drawers and shelves full of things in my mother's house. Miho raises her eyebrows, amused, when she sees that I have bought a whole set of six cups.
It is in the simplicity of the few things – and in the care for them – that one finds one's bearings in this full, chaotic and involuntary Mediterranean West of ours. It is a placid being, hers, in a new world that she is facing, year after year, creating collections and weaving white plots: kindly being among others, listening.
She was a girl born with curly hair – a rare trait in Japan where most people have straight hair – in a context where maintaining social harmony within the group is essential. Miho tells me this when we begin to become familiar, and I can therefore relate it keeping in mind some photographs she showed me. She spoke to me of her first works, made at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tokyo, like plants without water.
A trip from Japan brought her here, a long holiday in Europe that then transformed, once she returned home, into a deep desire, that of staying and trying to imagine a new life.
Miho is an artist who works with stone, tackles it and shapes it. She masterfully manages its forms, sometimes rigid, sometimes soft. She has lived in Naples for five years, going through its din and adopting a lifestyle in which productivity is not everything, everything, everything. This is what she told me when talking about her choice to be here. In Naples, Miho moves with a quiet step. She observes a lot, speaks little. She has found a balance, always precarious and made up of many obstacles, in this city full of curves, sounds and contradictions: she is very distant from a precision and an order from which she almost seems to have escaped.
Miho, however, is fully and manifestly here in Naples; she has simply chosen another path, without shame. Little by little, listening to herself and putting her artistic practice under the magnifying glass, she discovers aspects of her culture of origin that unconsciously permeate and emerge. After moving to Italy, she began to have a relationship of discovery towards the places she travels; this new approach to research has also brought about changes in the use of different mediums, which until then were limited to semiprecious stones. She now experiments with classic materials of sculpture, often accompanying them with waste elements found during urban explorations, which she calls walks.
She is attracted to surfaces that hold the signs of time. Her work is direct, patient. She often works in silence, following gestures that repeat until they become natural. Like a writing that is done by hand, slowly; a continuous process that holds together patience and intention.
Into the din is then the way to stay inside the noise without being overwhelmed by it. A threshold, more than a manifesto. A practice that links discretion and presence. A way of being that concerns Miho's artistic production here in Italy.
Miho weaves. Without a loom, without a needle, she intertwines stone and paper, threads and fragments. Her gestures and paths are never entirely linear: they move forward and then back, they are tied to time, they write it diagonally.
There is a white thread that runs through her works. Sometimes it is real, a stretched cotton that wraps, protects, covers, as in the series About objects (2021-2025). Sculptures in which urban elements, found and collected, are cloaked in a clear chaotic warp: cobblestones, fragments of columns, heavy stones become light surfaces. A way for the artist to know the objects in their shape, weight, consistency, hiding them from the viewer through weaving and embroidery.These were precisely, due to the conditions of general distance from written culture, the only form of writing for many women throughout History and today Miho uses poetry and plot like this: intimate and particular strategies to know the world. Hers is a spatial and temporal notation together: linear in writing, synthetic in reading. She writes in time; she reads in space.
As well Untie (2025), a temporary installation composed of white terracotta confetti tied with red thread, speaks to us of this. Each small piece can be detached, taken away. In exchange, one can leave a thought, a wish, a word written on paper: a gesture that recalls omikuji (御御籤), the Japanese practice of written oracles, hung on branches in temples to prevent bad luck from following those who have received them. Confetti are tied to free themselves, and untied to let go. As in the Japanese word antai (安泰): calm, without worries, stable. But also: to dissolve, untie, resolve.
The works in the Westscape series (2021-2025), instead, appear as precious fragments - sculptures composed of hard stones set with ceramic shards collected on the street, on the beaches and in the countryside, like intuitive maps of interior cities, found in travels and explorations of our Western landscape. Between one observation and another, Miho tells me about the wooden floors of Japanese houses, those on which objects do not break but bounce. After collecting a fragment, she begins the search for the stone in which to set it. This is chosen for chromatic and shape assonance or dissonance and for the preciousness associated with it by its uses in our monuments.
The fragment becomes a jewel, the waste takes on an aesthetic value and the broken ceramic returns to having an almost talismanic function and property. In Westscapes. One Side (2024-2025), these same fragments become pictorial compositions, constellations of memory and territory.
Throughout Miho Tanaka’s work there is a constant tension between the intimate gesture and the collective space.
It is as if she were telling us that inhabiting the world can also simply mean touching it with care, tying and untying, leaving and taking, as children do with their more serious games.
Margin note.
This critical text is the result of a series of conversations between curator Marta Ferrara and artist Miho Tanaka. The story develops as a shared reflection, which intertwines the artist's words with a critical reading of her works.