EXPERIMENT
Digital painting series
2021 - 2023
Two vampires, a boy and a girl, are created artificially by an unknown maker from the same DNA. They are engineered beings who still search for something human: closeness, comfort, a sense of self.
The series draws on the idea that every person carries both feminine and masculine energy. The two characters are not a couple, but two halves of a single being. Each is the other’s reflection, and their love borders on self-love.
Through their story, Mia explores identity as something constructed, divided and mirrored, and asks whether loving another can ever be separated from longing for oneself.
look at the mirror
and kiss yourself
digital painting
4356 × 2925 pixel
2022
Two faces, one origin. Covered in the same blood and sharing the same DNA, the boy and the girl lean into each other like a person and their reflection.
The work is the conceptual centre of the series: loving the other becomes loving oneself, and the line between two beings dissolves.
PLAYTIME
digital painting
5000 × 4000 pixel
2023
At playtime the girl is a little careless, and a white mouse, the classic laboratory animal, dangles from her fingers.
Herself the product of an experiment, she now holds one in her hand, and the roles of creator and subject quietly reverse.
FEEDING
digital painting
5518 × 7283 pixel
2021
They are fed only a few bags of blood at a time, handed out like rations.
He has no identity of his own. Without the girl, he is incomplete.
Is it possible to be complete on our own, or do we always search for our other half?
do vampires eat noodles?
digital painting
4887 × 5029 pixel
2022
The work is inspired by two phenomena of contemporary Japanese youth culture.
Hikikomori are people, often young, who withdraw from society and shut themselves away at home for months or even years, with screens as their only window to the outside.
The Toyoko kids are young people, many of them runaways from troubled homes, looking for a sense of belonging among strangers in the middle of the city.
They watch the world without being part of it: they are definitely strangers here.