The Haight Street Art Center is pleased to present Junko Mizuno: Ink, Paper, Plastic at the Print Studio Gallery. Her work first appeared at the Haight Street Art Center in 2024, when she was a part of Women of Rock Art. This is her first solo exhibition at the center.
Manga meets Pop Art and more
Born in 1973 and raised in Tokyo, Japan, Junko Mizuno has lived and worked in San Francisco since 2009. She began making art as a 2- or 3-year-old, and pitched her first comic book to a publisher at 10. Known primarily as a manga artist, she has an eclectic style that defies categorization. While in school, she was influenced by the art of Aubrey Beardsley and soon graduated to Alberto Vargas. By the time she was 25, she had published her first graphic novel, Pure Trance.
All of these influences helped her create an iconography revolving around stylized figures. These cartoon figures often feature powerful, sexy women, but the deeper influences reflect Mizuno’s interests in Japanese pop culture of the 1970s and ’80s, her knowledge of Japanese folk art and contemporary psychedelia, fashion, and nature, as well as comic books and video games.
The exhibition shares scores of pieces, including dozens of screen-printed rock posters. Commissioned by Secret Serpents for bands like The Melvins, Faith No More, and Swans, these posters tell compact stories via Mizuno’s darkly cheerful characters, who inhabit the artist’s mythical worlds. For her art prints, Mizuno packs denser narratives into the pieces, which usually begin as paintings before being reproduced as giclées.
Ink, Paper, Plastic will include giclées from her Food Obsession series; several giclée Tarot cards; an assortment of original drawings and numerous books and other multiples in paper and vinyl.
Carrying on the tradition of rock posters
The Haight Street Art Center preserves the tradition of the San Francisco Bay and its influence on graphic design and rock imagery stemming from the summer of love era in the Haight Ashbury district. Psychedelic playbills and movie posters were largely influenced by the Art Nouveau style, letters curving around stylized figures and colorful imagery. These iconic music advertisements are a part of our collective memory, and Mizuno’s work is informed by these traditions while infusing the genre with her own signature. Twisting hair and flames circle the composition of a rock poster for the band Faith No More from 2010. Both her rock posters and fine-art prints show primal human activities, in this case, twisting spittle shapes spewing out of a mouth encircled in flames, the spittle ejecting a tiny bear-like figure with teeth gripping an object shaped like a steak. Activities such as eating are highly fetishized with hot rod fire and undulating psychedelic shapes.
Femininity, nature, and the transgressive
In her work Tree, powerful, hyper-cute female imagery is juxtaposed with darker, transgressive themes. Swirling branches and roots encircle the smiling female face of the tree (the steak-like food hanging from her mouth repeating the eating motif), and six breasts deliver pearl-like drops of milk to floating white animal-humanoid creatures. The tree is flanked by calm and powerful protective female spirits. Pharmaceutical capsules and tablets sit beneath a snail-like female hooked up to an IV, releasing a plum-colored solution. Protection, comfort, and healing unify an image that seems simultaneously retro and futuristic. Black flames and a tiny devil-horned creature in the foreground suggest a kind of chaos that must be kept at bay.
Junko Mizuno: Ink, Paper, Plastic is currently on view through March 22, 2026 at the Haight Street Art Center. A reception for the artist is planned in early February.