Girls tied to or hanging from trees, luxuriant vegetation, iridescent colours – Chiho Aoshima’s universe is one of contrasts between dreams and nightmares, terror and seduction. The third exhibition in the “Kawaii! Japan today” cycle, dedicated to young contemporary Japanese artists, shows the work of one of the most promising artists of her generation.
Chiho Aoshima is a tall, silent, mysterious person who likes to amble around ruins, abandoned buildings and cemeteries. Born in Tokyo in 1974, after finishing school she decided to visit Angkor, a place that had fascinated her for many years and that is still a source of inspiration for to her. On return to Japan, she studied economics, but after graduating she abandoned this career path and turned to art. Rather than canvases and tubes of paint, she uses printing techniques and the computer screen to create works in acid colours executed with an impressive precision, which take the viewer into to an astonishing dream world. Takashi Murakami soon discovered this young artist with a flair for computer-aided design, who is unrivalled when it comes to moving vectors. He engaged her as an assistant and gave her the job of transferring ring all his preliminary sketches to the computer in order to create the works before putting them on canvas. Today, Chiho Aoshima still forms part of the team at Kaikai Kiki Corporation, Murakami’s “workshop-company”. Parallel to this she developed her own highly individual work that has opened the doors to the leading galleries and art museums in Europe and the United States and has led to important commissions, such as those for the New York Subway (2005) and the London Underground (2006).
Between horror and eroticism
The universe created by Chiho Aoshima is one filled with teenage girls, insects and reptiles, and ranges from glorious dream images to nightmares and anguish. It is however a seductive kawaii nightmare. The figures appear in urban landscapes, watery settings, woods or cemeteries, and hover between children’s fairy stories and the violence of the real world. The buildings in the towns become disturbing, phantasmagorical silhouettes; the branches of a cherry tree in blossom emerge from a decomposing skull; bodies of pretty, blood-stained young girls are sucked up by a garishly-coloured whirlwind. In the work of Chiho Aoshima, seduction borders on terror and beauty is confronted with repulsiveness.
In each of her pieces, the artist takes a new look at the traditional Japanese aesthetic and its fascinating way of combining refinement with horror, beauty with monstrosity, the freshness of a young body with sadistic eroticism, although always with subtle delicacy. Faced with these naked teenagers, tied to trees in blossom, these fragile, shameless bodies in a setting that is reminiscent of the photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki, another expert in bandage, the viewer wonders whether to be seduced or disturbed. In the two series from 2007, Japanese apricot and The fountain of the skull, the ephemeral sakura flowers and the stark whiteness of the skulls is evocative of a modern-day vanitas. In her own way, Chiho Aoshima reworks a traditional iconography in which skulls and skeletons appear again and again, like the nineteenth-century prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi that show a devil in the form of a giant skeleton.
Chiho Aoshima’s adolescents often evolve in a world more appropriate to the Apocalypse, like the settings for many mangas, from Akira to Evangelion. The shadow of war, the threat of natural disasters, the promise of an ecological catastrophe, accidents, murdered or dismembered bodies: her works create a fusion between collective anxieties and individual fears.
Spirits and devils
Chiho Aoshima’s painting is inhabitedby masses of spirits:city spirits who wake up at night when the buildings come alive and who turn into elongated creatures, spotted with beams of light, stretching up to touch the starry sky (A fleeting moment of happiness); by the spirit of fire, who appears in Fairies burning, in which flames dance against the night sky, licking the wings of little creatures like tinkerbells. Her work reminds us that, in Japan, spirits – the kami – are everywhere: in the sound of the wind, in the crackling of the fire, but also in the rice people eat or the brush with which they comb their hair. Religion forms part of everyday life, and spirituality is taken for granted. In Tokyo, the temples are integrated in the city, and it is not at all unusual to find an executive stopping to pray for a few moments on his way to work in the morning, or a woman in a kimono leaving an offering as she passes by. In this respect, Aoshima’s images reveal very clearly the spirit of Japanese culture. They are anchored in the country’s traditional beliefs and superstitions, which she interprets in the style of today.
From computer to persimmon juice
What is more surprising to the Western eye in Japan is perhaps this mixture of tradition and modernity that is found everywhere. The girls in the street with their ultra-modern clothes mingle with families wearing the kimono; the most futurist architecture is found alongside whole districts of traditional houses. This is certainly one of the most fascinating aspects of the work of Chiho Aoshima: this meeting between the evocation of ancestral traditions and the imagination of a twenty-first century artist. It is a combination that can also be seen in the techniques she employs in her work. Although she creates the images on the computer, Chiho Aoshima also uses much older techniques, as shown in her latest series produced with persimmon juice and gold leaf. Reviving the vertical form of the kakemono, the artist appropriates a traditional material – fermentedpersimmon juice – which impregnates the paper, gives it a brownish tone and makes it impermeable. In The doll of Otafuku, she combines this ancient medium with her own aesthetic and with the famous laughing mask of Otafuku, symbol of health, happiness and intelligence.
Chiho Aoshima often covers the entire exhibition space, from floor to ceiling, with huge digital prints. She has recently made an animated film to be projected on five screens, as well as a series of large-format sculptures. In her exhibition at the Joan Miró Foundation she will be showing a new series of twelve watercolours – Chinese Zodiacs – created specially for the “Kawaii!” cycle, as well as other pieces, some of them on a monumental scale (prints over 4 metres wide), that show the complexity of her universe and immerse the viewer in a strange, disturbing, seductive world.
Exhibition organised in collaboration with Kaikai Kiki Corporation and the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris.
