- Dates
- —
- Curated by
- Hélène Kelmachter
Aya Takano
When Tradition and Modernity Meet Again
21 September–11 November 2007
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, who opens the Espai 13 series Kawaii! El Japó ara (Kawaii! Japan Now).
Manga, video games and painting
Born in 1976, Aya Takano, since her early twenties, has developed a distinctive and personal language that fuses traditional Japanese motifs with sci-fi references and elements of modern-day Japan. Her large-scale paintings and delicate watercolours draw on the ukiyo-e tradition – literally “images of the floating world” – to invent a world where adolescent girls with disproportionately long limbs, dressed in kimonos, seem to levitate. Aya Takano is not only a painter – she also draws manga, writes science fiction, and has contributed to the visual design of video games and the production of animated films. In 2004, Naoki Takizawa invited her to create a clothing collection illustrated with her paintings and drawings for Issey Miyake. She is now exhibiting for the first time in Spain.
Revisiting Hokusai
With their kimonos and traditional hairstyles, the girls in Aya Takano’s works stand somewhere between tea-house courtesans and the fashion-forward denizens of Shibuya. With their big eyes, long limbs and playful pouts, they channel the visual codes of manga and the contemporary image of the Japanese Lolita. Yet they are also rooted in the legacy of Edo-period printmaking, which depicted geishas, samurai, kabuki actors and tea-house courtesans.
Pretty or subversive?
Aya Takano’s works often resemble pages from a personal diary. They evoke the artist’s fantasies and dreams, her anxieties and aspirations, as well as those of her generation. She frequently uses pastel hues to depict her uninhibited adolescents, caught somewhere between provocation and innocence, between transgression and restraint. Merging the pretty and the subversive, I know that just a kiss will take me far away (2006) presents a scene of female homosexuality: two young women in kimonos kneel on a tatami mat and kiss, their cheeks flushed with both desire and the thrill of breaking a taboo.
This back-and-forth between the pretty and the subversive, between tradition and modernity, is symbolised in Takano’s work by the image of the bridge – a recurring motif. A symbol of passage, connection and transformation, the bridge links two worlds. For about ten years, the artist has explored this motif in her drawings and watercolours. A female figure with an arched spine becomes the support for a landscape: a wave, an urban scene, or lush flowers that might have come straight from an Utamaro print.
Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd
In 1996, at the age of twenty, she joined the studio of Takashi Murakami and became one of his assistants. Since then, she has been part of Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd – a company founded by Murakami to promote emerging artists through exhibitions, publications and merchandising.
The exhibition at Espai 13 brings together twenty-five works – paintings on canvas, watercolours, a giant sculpture and an animated film – offering a comprehensive overview of Takano’s work.
Exhibition organised in collaboration with Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris and Miami) and Kaikai Kiki Corporation (Tokyo – New York).
