Chiho Aoshima
Blum & Poe, Santa Monica
February 8 - March 9, 2002
BULM & POE
2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, CA 90404
www.blumandpoe.com
Blum & Poe, Santa Monica
February 8 - March 9, 2002
In her solo debut, Chiho Aoshima exhibits five medium to large-scale digital prints. Most recently seen in the traveling exhibition Superflat, her work is identified with the visual and conceptual precedents of Takashi Murakami's work. Chiho Aoshima's style demonstrates the striking trend of anime- and manga-influenced work that has garnered so much attention in recent Japanese art. This work derives many of its stylistic cues from 18th- and 19th-century traditions of formal and spatial reduction. In Chiho Aoshima's work, space and scale are obfuscated by the all-over compositional methods she creates digitally. Though they have the appearance of paintings, she composes her brightly-hued work entirely on the computer, which allows for every inch of the work to be painstakingly rendered.
Chiho Aoshima's works often depict adolescent girls in humorous or bizarre situations. These range from magical and dream-like to dark and horrific. The visual vocabulary she uses exemplifies kawaii, or cute, imagery, but Chiho Aoshima twists this distinctly Japanese device into her own. Frogs, girls, cherry blossoms, fish, snakes, and noodles all occupy the same world, a world with indecipherable terrain, where there is no demarcation between air, water, or land. Still-life and portraiture mix easily in Chiho Aoshima's variously scaled works, as do fashion, design, and traditional art practices.
Chiho Aoshima lives and works in Tokyo and is the head of Digital Drawing for Takashi Murakami's Hiropon Factory.
The pieces were created with the support of Canon, who generously assisted Chiho Aoshima with the printing.
BULM & POE
2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, CA 90404
www.blumandpoe.com
