For the past 10 years — beginning in 2011 — artist Tanaka Tatsuya has been creating daily miniature landscapes in the form of a calendar. That’s 3650 creative, dramatic and often humorous scenes crafted from everyday objects like fruit, vegetables and stationary, which are paired with figurines. To celebrate 10 years of work, the artist is staging an exhibition at The Mizuno Museum in Nagano prefecture.
The exhibition, which is titled Miniature Life, showcases 150 of Tanaka’s works. Some are photographs but others are actual recreations, which you can get up close to and even photograph.
Tanaka attributes his seemingly endless stream of creativity to that same thought that we’ve all experienced. “Broccoli and parsley might sometimes look like a forest, or the tree leaves floating on the surface of the water might sometimes look like little boats,” he says. “I wanted to take this way of thinking and express it through photographs, so I started to put together a MINIATURE CALENDAR.”
The exhibition at The Mizuno Museum is up now through May 30, 2021. General admission is 1200 yen.