With ‘Eternity in a Moment,’ Japanese artist Mika Ninagawa portrays everyday wonders

TOKYO (AP) — Flowers blossoming like pink chiffon, luscious berries and fluttering goldfish make for the delicate but defiant beauty that’s signature Mika Ninagawa.

With “Eternity in a Moment,” the Japanese photographer and filmmaker has created an immersive installation where a visitor walks through rooms with various motifs. One is filled with flowers sprouting everywhere like a Garden of Eden gone berserk.

Other rooms have circles of light popping up in darkness, or rows of fluffy cushions where people take in imagery projected on the ceiling. It’s a whimsical bombardment of the senses.

“With the world going through all these momentous changes, we’ve experienced how humble, yet precious, even miraculous, this reality is in the everyday, so fragile like sand escaping through our fingers,” Ninagawa told The Associated Press at her home office in Tokyo.

“We feel we want to treasure this beauty. We feel we want to preserve this moment.”

Her exhibition, which toured various museums last year, is now at the Tokyo Node exhibition space in Toranomon Hills Station Tower through Feb. 25.

The daughter of Yukio Ninagawa, the renowned theater director behind innovative productions of Shakespeare and Greek tragedies, Ninagawa started out as a photographer.

She is credited as an originator of the 1990s “girlie photo” movement, in which young women took snapshots of whatever struck their fancy. Then she went through a period of anger, rebelling against a male-dominated society in Japan that she felt oppressed women and reduced them to commodities.

Her father’s death seven years ago changed her again, she recalled.

“I started seeing the world through the perspective of someone who was about to leave this world, when you notice all the