Miki Ishiyama was born in Hokkaido in 1998. She graduated from the Oil Painting Course, Department of Painting, Faculty of Art and Design at Tama Art University in 2020 and is currently studying for her master’s degree in the Oil Painting Course, Department of Painting in the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts.
The impetus for Ishiyama’s painting process comes from listening to music. She goes searching on the internet for musicians whom she is not even sure exist, and when she finds them, she listens to them over and over. As if possessed by their presence, she commits images that have a sense of life to canvas. By painting these images with the most basic of techniques, she expands her own unique painting universe, in which her personal encounters and experiences are assimilated into the act of painting.