is a Japanese artist, composer, and performer who played a key role in the development of Fluxus. A co-founder of the seminal postwar Japanese experimental music collective Group Ongaku, she is known for her investigations of the nature and limits of sound, music, and auditory experiences. Her work has been widely circulated as Fluxus editions, featured in concert halls, museums, galleries, and non-traditional spaces, and re-performed by other musicians and artists numerous times. She is best known for her work of the 1960s and early 1970s, especially Spatial Poem, Water Music, Endless Box, and the various instructions in Events & Games, all of which were produced as Fluxus editions. Now in her eighties, she continues to produce new work. Biography Early Training and Group Ongaku Mieko Shiomi was born in Okayama, Japan. She began music lessons as a child and studied music at Tokyo University of the Arts in 1957 under composers Yoshio Hasegawa and Minao Shibata, graduating in 1961. In 1960, while still a student, she co-founded Group Ongaku (Group Music) to explore improvisation and action. Members of this collective included Takehisa Kosugi, Shukou Mizuno, Mikio Tojima, and Gen’ichi Tsuge, with Yasunao Tone joining later. Shiomi returned to Okayama in March 1962 after completing her Bachelor's degree and a year of graduate study at the Tokyo University of the Arts. In a solo performance at the Okayama Cultural Center she performed her own new compositions alongside those of American composers John Cage and Morton Feldman. Between 1963 and 1964 she began to compose what she termed "action poems," eliminating musical notation from the score entirely in favor of verbal instructions to be interpreted by the performer. Fluxus Life in New York Several incidents connected Shiomi to Fluxus, leading George Maciunas to invite her to New York in 1964. Art historian Midori Yoshimoto explains that both Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yoko Ōno had mentioned Shiomi's work to Maciunas, and art historian Colby Chamberlain notes that a card in Maciunas' file records a recommendation of Shiomi from Toshi Ichiyanagi by letter, written after she performed in his concert at the Sogetsu Art Center, on January of 1962. Shiomi further explains that while working on the action poems Mirror Piece and Endless Box in 1963, she made a trip to Tokyo where she was introduced to Nam June Paik by a mutual friend. Upon showing Paik her action poems, he promised to send