CHIHO AOSHIMA: EMPTINESSES
Perrotin announces Emptinesses by Chiho Aoshima. She has developed a universe that combines traditional Japanese references, memories of manga, science fiction, a love of nature and somewhat ambiguous female representations.
March 16 – April 6, 2024
Through ceramics, watercolours and acrylic on canvas, the artist, who was born in Tokyo in 1974, is continuing a cycle that currently focuses mainly on female figures, having abandoned zombies and skulls. One of the paintings in the exhibition, Act with Caution on a Full Moon Day!, 2024, shows a green mountainous landscape transformed into a face with long hair, evoking notions of animism. In the background, a sexy naked figure plays with rabbits whilst attempting to tame her long mane – a kind of Ophelia 2.0, in reference to the painting by the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais.
The painting can also be read as depicting several generations – the young girl and the mature lady with her curled up fingers – and if we continue to delve into the history of art, as a contemporary and very personal version of Gustav Klimt’s Three Ages of Woman (1905). Or an allegory of the temptress witch, faced with a naïve ingenue... The intoxicating piece from Death and the Maiden, a quartet by Franz Schubert, also springs to mind, which was written in 1824 and used in Jane Campion’s film Portrait of a Lady in 1996.
Representing these multiple figures of girls and women is a way for Chiho Aoshima to express her own emotions without committing herself to a cause. She is increasingly exploring this through the medium of ceramics, depicting small figures midway between fairies and geisha, or more mysterious apparitions, reminiscent of the Shinto religion, always with a very sensual link to the natural elements.
The kind of dimension that we imagine to be driven by the resurgence of disaster films, manga recounting postapocalyptic projections or the danger of immanent ecological disasters. Here again, the artist takes a restrained approach to the subject, not actively engaging in the environmental debate, but still expressing her intimate and personal relationship with the cosmos.
In her works on paper and canvas, this experience is pursued with a redoubled connection between the figure and nature, shaking up the directions of gravity and levitation. Flowers and their roots fly into the sky. Rhizomes break free. Tufts of grass are inhabited by a joyful colony of elves, haloed by a luminous sky and the flight of dragonflies. These Odonata, signs of good fortune, could simultaneously be likened to drones and discreetly speak to us of surveillance...
The vibrant, shaded colours, far removed from the Superflat of her beginnings, draw the viewer into her galaxy, which oscillates between fairy tales and anxious projections... It’s like a rejection of ordinary triviality, or what she calls “Riajuu” in Japanese, the feeling of fulfilment in the real world, which she has never been able to fully experience. Chiho Aoshima reflects a great deal on this time, which moves at a frenetic pace.