Spot Home Gallery presents the first anthological exhibition in Italy of Japanese artist Miho Kajioka, entitled What did the mermaid tell you?, featuring a selection of works that trace her artistic path over the past decade or so: And do you still hear the peacocks?, a series born in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster – a silent reflection on beauty that emerges after grief; So it goes, a poetic journey through non-linear time and memory; the more recent Tanzaku series, delicate visual fragments inspired by the vertical paper strips used in Japanese tradition for inscribing poems; and some new works created specifically for this occasion.
The title What did the mermaid tell you? draws inspiration from a poetic reflection on the unexpected yet profound connection between Naples, the city hosting the exhibition, and Kajioka’s homeland, Japan: two distant yet kindred places, embraced by the sea and shaped by volcanic fire, inhabited by legendary creatures like mermaids. In both lands, the forces of nature have generated stories that transcend time, interweaving reality and imagination, beauty and tragedy.
In this shared world of myth and traditions, the mermaid becomes our guide, leading us into Miho Kajioka’s poetic universe — suspended between the visible and the invisible, light and shadow, presence and absence.
What did the mermaid tell you?
Perhaps she speaks of the fragility of existence, of the beauty that embraces imperfection, of the delicate grace that dwells in the small wonders of everyday life.
 
 
Miho Kajioka is an artist who explores the profound connection between memory, time, and beauty. While considering herself more a painter than a photographer, she uses photography as a medium to express her artistic vision. Her approach is spontaneous and intuitive: she carries her camera everywhere, capturing fleeting fragments of everyday life that strike her. These collected images then become the raw starting material for her meticulous darkroom process, where, through alternative and experimental printing techniques, she transforms them into authentic objects, poetic and evocative.
Her ethereal silver gelatin prints are distinguished by their irregular edges and extensive use of empty spaces, evoking faded memories that seem to slowly dissolve into nothingness.
The use of tea or coffee toning enhances the suspended, dreamlike atmosphere of her images, infusing them with an aura of mystery and nostalgia, as if they emerged from an undefined time.
Kajioka’s aesthetic sensibility is deeply rooted in her cultural background, yet it was profoundly shaped by the experience of distance. At the age of 18, she left Japan to study art in the United States and Canada. From afar, she began to confront, explore, and reconnect with her own heritage — not as a rigid set of traditions, but as a subtle, contemplative way of perceiving the world: attuned to the subtlest details, pauses and silences, and the invisible connections that linger in the spaces between things.

Often inspired by traumatic events — such as the 2011 earthquake and tsunami — her photographs become meditations on the beauty of life, not as a denial of pain, but as a response to the awareness of its fragility.
In each shot, Kajioka plays with the concept of time: a fluid, nonlinear time where past, present, and future intertwine, and every moment becomes a fragment of an infinite memory.

Internationally recognized for her refined artist’s books, Miho Kajioka is today one of the most poetic voices in contemporary photography.
 
 
Artist statement
For many years I didn’t pursue my work as an artist, but tragedy reconnected me to it.
I moved to the US when I was a teenager and began studying painting at San Francisco Art Institute. There, for the first time, I could see my own country and its culture from the outside and this is how I learnt the beauty of it.
For eight years when I was living in the US and Canada, Japan had been my main artistic concern. However, when I returned to Japan, having been admiring it for years: I lost the purpose for making art. So, I embarked on a career in journalism.
It was Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami that reconnected me with art.
I’d been reporting the catastrophe for a Brazilian TV news station every day and night since the disaster occurred. It was the first time I felt death so close to me.
Three months after the disaster, while reporting in the coastal city of Kamaishi, where over 800 people had died, I found roses blooming beside a blasted building. The mixture of grace and destruction made me think of a Japanese poem:
In the spring, cherry blossoms,
In the summer the cuckoo,
In autumn the moon, and in
Winter the snow, clear, cold.
Written by the Zen monk Dogen, the poem describes the fleeting, fragile beauty of the changing seasons. The roses I saw in Kamaishi bloomed simply because the weather becamewarmer. That beautiful and uncomplicated statement, made by roses in the midst of ruin, impressed me and returned me to art. (M.K.)