Conversation with Kazuko Miyamoto, New York, 2003

In this conversation, Kazuko Miyamoto begins by describing her early exposure to art in Japan through her father’s friend, a traditional artist. When she moved to New York in the early 1960s, she encountered ​​a​​bstract ​​e​​xpressionism and felt liberated by non-figurative art that rejected depiction, narrative, and landscape. She was excited by the breaking of pictorial space into multiple fields.

Miyamoto notes the strong influence of fellow artists trained in calligraphy. Their brushwork and discipline became a crucial source for abstraction in the U.S. art scene and deeply affected her thinking. She later met Sol LeWitt, who lived in the same building, and assisted him, absorbing ideas from ​​m​​inimalism, ​​c​​onceptual art, and site-specific installation. Around 1969, these encounters led her to quit painting.

She began working with string, using it as both tool and material: “I did a lot of the installation directly on the wall with strings.” She spent nearly eight years making wall installations and linear drawings. Over time, however, she grew tired of repeating the same approach and turned toward organic motifs. Miyamoto elaborates on her shifting artistic approach: “I traveled to the southwest. It really changed me, looking at the nature in Colorado. And I hear​d​ the sound of that wind going through the trees, and I thought I got a message from nature.” After this encounter, she began using natural and leftover materials, partly because she disliked the artificiality and cost of art supplies.

Miyamoto describes how her practice continued to shift—from string installations to object-based works and eventually to video. Her recent video projects focus on interviewing neighborhood musicians. She relates to the physical realities of being an artist in New York—expensive studio space, working outdoors in heat or snow, using backyards, and documenting these struggles as part of her practice: “I want to make a video movie kind of documentation of what we are doing in the back room.” Miyamoto embraces the idea that all aspects of her life and labor can be art, a philosophy aligned with a feminist perspective.

The conversation ends with detailed documentation of her current sculptural installation process, which involves constructing large architectural forms from wood. She also shares stories about photography, performance, and ritual objects related to water and drought. Miyamoto emphasizes her belief that making the work itself is what matters most: “It doesn’t matter, you know, to get reviews—just do it.”