Lieko Shiga

Lieko Shiga (志賀理江子) (born 1980) is a Japanese photographer. She is best known for her "Rasen Kaigan" (spiral coast) series.

Career

Shiga was born in Okazaki, Aichi in 1980. After graduating from high school she enrolled in Tokyo Polytechnic University. She left school halfway through the term and enrolled at Chelsea College of Arts in London in 1999. She graduated in 2004. From 2007 to 2008, Shiga was part of an Agency of Cultural Affairs program for young artists that allowed her to continue studying in London. While participating in the program she published Lilly, a photograph collection of people living in her apartment building. She also won the Kimura Ihei Award for Canary, a photograph series taken in Australia and Sendai. In 2009 she won an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York City.

After returning to Japan, Shiga moved to Kitakama, Miyagi, where she partnered with a local cameraman to photograph festivals and sports days while recording oral histories with residents. While there, she and the other people who lived in Kitakama were devastated by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The earthquake destroyed Shiga's studio, but more importantly it killed sixty people in the small village. Her "Rasen Kaigan" (spiral coast) series was inspired by the events of that day.

In 2012 Shiga won the Higashikawa Prize for new artists.

Her photographs have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Style

Shiga has been compared to Rinko Kawauchi, one of her contemporaries, but her style is more expressionist. Her photographs have been called "dreamscapes" by Marco Bohr (in Time magazine), who also compared her to Masatoshi Naito. Her images are surreal and gloomy, but mostly inspired by the places around her.