The Miracle of Silence Toshiko Okanoue

*Available only in Europe

*This book is secondhand.

Published in 2019 alongside the Kawade Shobo Shinsha edition, this book is a retrospective collection tied to exhibitions held at venues including the Museum of Art, Kochi. Its title, "The Miracle of Silence," captures Okanoue's own trajectory: an artist who stopped working after marriage and, after a long silence, was rediscovered in the 1990s by curator Ryuichi Kaneko. As in the companion volume, the heart of the book is her early-1950s photo collages, in which women, landscapes and objects clipped from Vogue, Life and similar magazines are cut and recombined into Surrealist visions. Where the Kawade "Essence" edition concentrates on the sheer beauty of the images, this Seigensha volume leans toward the exhibition catalogue, tracing her life and historical context more fully. It helps readers grasp how themes of war, femininity and gender relations lie hidden beneath her delicate imagery. Read together with the Kawade book, it gives a rounded picture of an art born in a remarkably brief creative span.