Michiko Kon was born in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture in 1955. She graduated in 1978 from the Department of Printmaking at Sokei Academy of Design and Fine Art, and studied at Tokyo College of Photography from 1978 to 1980. Since her solo show Still Life at Shinjuku Nikon Salon in 1985, she has produced unique still-life photo works that use fresh food as their main subject. Vegetables appeared early on, as in her first work Cabbages and Bed I (1979), which depicts many cabbages filling a bed. Around 1986 she began cutting, arranging, and attaching food to objects, particularly fish heads, eyes and skin. For Kon, the objective was to provoke the tactile and olfactory senses of the viewer, which leads to an ambiguous state, something between comfortable and uncomfortable. Also evoked here was a sense of time in which foods finally rot and smell bad, different but similar to traditional still life paintings.

It has been pointed out that her works are reminiscent of how a Surrealist would compose things from different contexts on the same stage in order to create new, strange meaning, a process called dépaysement. This is true, but Kon’s work goes beyond this. What makes her style unique is the way that fresh fish parts function as pictorial components to create forms: a hat in the case of Round Herrings and Silk Hat (1994). These elements are combined with a clock, a watch, glasses and leopard-pattern cloth, as in a typical Surrealist setting. However, the fish parts command such a strong presence that viewers struggle to see the whole picture, instead seeing each part as the subject matter itself, similar to portrait paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593). This approach is applied to figures as well as objects in her pictures. Chicken, Pump Ukulele (2001) features something of a femme fatale style that eroticises the female figure while also putting it into a position where it is seen and then objectified, even the body of a doll. As previously mentioned, however, the eyes of a fish on the body of a chicken that looks like a doll are too unexpected for the viewer to see them as mere parts. The eye of the chicken itself becomes detached from its position as an object just to be seen.

It has also been argued that Kon’s image making reflects her gender perspective, in terms of how the male body is selected as a motif more than the female body. In conclusion, Kon has created photo works along the theme of still life that evoke feelings that shuttle between attraction and awkwardness in a unique way, inventing an alternative perspective from the male gaze that tends to objectify and portray still subjects in pictures for more than forty years.

A major solo show by Kon, philia—KON Michiko, was held at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura Annex in 2021. She won the 16th Kimura Ihei Award in 1991.