Teppei Miyake

Teppei Miyake (born in 1985 in Kobe, Japan) is an artist who established the “New Funeral Laboratory,” where he reexamines our relationship with the deceased. Through refined painting techniques and philosophical inquiry, he reinterprets traditional funeral culture, creating new burial styles such as home-placed gravestones and portrait memorial paintings. By adapting the way we confront death to the modern era, Miyake aims to preserve the bond between the living and the dead while constructing a future tradition.

Alongside these projects, he actively exhibits his artworks—especially his “Absentees” series—in solo exhibitions and public installations, including airport displays.

Miyake’s work captures moments in which those who could not exist are made present. In the Absentees series, he visits specific sites, digs into the soil strata, and casts the layers in resin, preserving them in three-dimensional form. These layers contain tens of millions of years of geological history. For example, in Kimitsu Sandware, created in Kimitsu, Chiba Prefecture, the stratum includes sand, gravel, plants, and shell fossils. By engaging in the physical act of excavation, he sheds light on absence and visualizes the continuity of past, present, and future. While the artworks in this series express “absence itself,” the New Funeral Laboratory project redefines the relationship between the living and the individualized afterlife through portraits and personal memorials, layering connections across time and identity.

Although based in Tokyo, Miyake conducts fieldwork primarily in the mountainous areas of Kimitsu, Chiba. These strata, heavily mined during Japan’s period of rapid economic growth and still evolving today, are excavated by Miyake and restructured into art materials. Through his interventions in this geologic timeline, he highlights intersections with contemporary society and gestures toward where we may be heading.

For this exhibition, he also uses coal layers from Iizuka in Fukuoka Prefecture—a town once thriving from coal mining—embedding the region’s unique history and memory into his works.

 

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