Girls wearing kimonos or ultra-modern fashions, hi-tech architecture or wooden temples: tradition and modernity live side by side on the streets of Tokyo. Today’s artists also appropriate tradition in order to reinvent it and re-create it.
This meeting of past and present is evident in the works of Aya Takano (Saitama, 1976). The young artist draws inspiration from the traditional Ukiyo-e painting (meaning literally “images of the floating world”) in order to modify it and invent a world in which teenagers with unnaturally long limbs seem to levitate in their kimonos. Her paintings contain echoes of the Edo period (1603-1868) while at the same time reflecting the Japan of today. The watercolours, which are decidedly erotic in tone, also recall the shunga (images of spring) tradition, which represented lovers and tea-house prostitutes. Orgiastic scenes of half-naked adolescents devouring octopus tentacles or wild boar in the festive lamplight; nocturnal visions of a Tokyo illuminated in a way that gives it the appearance of a dream world; intimate scenes between two girls in kimonos, their cheeks ablaze with the first flush of love: Aya Takano creates a world that is her own personal world, in which she shows the more fascinating and contradictory aspects of present-day Japan.
Aya Takano is a painter, but she also draws manga, writes science fiction, and has worked on the visual conception of video games and animated films. She forms part of Kaikai Kiki, the workshop set up by Takashi Murakami, who works with and promotes young artists.
The exhibition in the Espai 13 contains twenty-five pieces: canvases, watercolours, an amazing giant sculpture, and an animated film. Aya Takano has produced one work specifically for the show, which is inspired by the architecture of the Joan Miró Foundation.
Exhibition organised in collaboration with the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, and Kaikai Kiki, New York and Tokyo.
