EMI KURAYA: GIRL’S TIME
Perrotin is pleased to present Girl’s Time. Emi Kuraya’s artistic journey is a dialogue between the self and the world, an exploration that transcends physical boundaries to delve into the realms of inner landscapes and the nuanced interplay between fiction and reality.
July 20 – August 31, 2024
A significant aspect of Kuraya’s art is her focus on female figures, particularly teenage girls, as the primary subjects of her paintings. This choice of subject is deeply personal, a reflection of her own identity and experiences, yet it transcends the individual to address broader questions of gender, perception, and the societal constructs that shape our understanding of girlhood.
Boys, ‘the opposite gender as unknown existence’ in the artist’s own words, when they appear, are not so much characters in their own right as they are elements that highlight the multilayered complexity of female experience, adding depth and contrast to the predominantly female landscapes she portrays.
There is a certain ‘lightness’ to Kuraya’s work, reflected in the pastel colors, the innocent look of the girls and the familiarity of the everyday scenes. Her choice of colors is not deliberate, however, but the result of allowing her palette to evolve naturally from her technique, drawing on the textures and hues created by the interplay of light and canvas.
By incorporating elements from photographs of places she has visited in Japan or her own childhood experiences into her paintings, yet allowing her characters to spring from the well of her imagination, she embraces discrepancies that underscore the open-endedness of her creations.
In capturing these fleeting moments of adolescence, Kuraya creates a space where the line between the viewer and the viewed blurs, where each glance holds a story, and every scene is a gateway to myriad interpretations. As elements of Shoujo Manga aesthetics and Otaku spirit weave through her work, they create a playful tension, a reminder of the fluid boundaries between art forms and the ever-present dialogue between representation and self-reflection.
Emi Kuraya’s art is thus a testament to the potential of seeing, feeling, and ultimately, understanding, in a world that is forever caught between girlhood and adulthood, the imaginary and the real, the lightness of being and the profundity of the worldly.