Miho Morita - Bio
Miho Morita is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice bridges traditional painting and contemporary digital processes. Trained in oil painting at Musashino Art University Junior College in Tokyo, she creates layered compositions through digital painting, collage, and custom textures derived from her own acrylic works. Her images are characterized by a strong sense of material depth and painterly surface.
Her process draws on an early and lasting encounter with oil painting — its atmospheric depth, the way light emerged from within shadow and wrapped around form, and the physical weight of layered surfaces. These qualities remain central to how she constructs images today, now realized through digital means.
She joined Alexis Bittar in November 2009, the year before the brand received the CFDA Accessory Designer of the Year award, contributing to the design and production of its reverse-painted Lucite and gilded jewelry collections — developing original designs, overseeing their translation into factory production, and instructing artisans on the painting technique.
In some works, she incorporates photographic material and algorithmically generated imagery as raw elements, subjecting them to extensive transformation, overpainting, and recomposition until they are fully absorbed into the visual structure of the work.
Expanding beyond static formats, her work incorporates elements of motion graphics and audiovisual expression, including an ongoing collaboration with sound artist water brain on video works that unite her visual practice with original music. Through this, she extends her layered painterly sensibility into a time-based medium.
By integrating tactile sensibility with digital construction, she explores new possibilities at the intersection of analog and digital, past and present.
Artist Statement
I am a Brooklyn-based artist with a background in oil painting, trained at Musashino Art University Junior College in Tokyo.
My practice explores the translation of painterly sensibility into a digital environment, focusing on how material depth and surface presence can be reconstituted through contemporary image-making.
My work is rooted in an early visual memory of encountering oil paintings — where atmosphere filled the pictorial space,
where light emerged from within shadow and wrapped around form, and where layered surfaces carried the weight of accumulated gesture.
This formative experience continues to inform my approach to image construction.
Working through digital painting, collage, and layered composition, I construct images that evolve through accumulation, erosion, and reconstruction. Rather than following a linear process, each work develops through continuous adjustment, where fragments are integrated, disrupted, and redefined within a single pictorial field.
A central element of my work is the incorporation of textures derived from my own acrylic paintings. These elements carry traces of physical gesture and material history, allowing the image to retain a sense of tactility and tension despite its digital construction.
In some works, I engage a hybrid image-making process that includes photographic material and algorithmically generated imagery.
These sources function as raw material rather than final forms, undergoing extensive transformation, overpainting, and recomposition until they are fully absorbed into the structure of the work.
My practice is concerned with the boundary between the physical and the virtual, questioning how images can sustain a sense of weight, ambiguity, and presence in an increasingly immaterial visual culture. Through this approach, I aim to expand the language of painting beyond its traditional medium while maintaining its fundamental depth and complexity.
In addition to still image-making, I collaborate with the sound artist water brain on video works that integrate my visual practice with original music, extending the layered sensibility of my paintings into a time-based medium.