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Chiho Aoshima

Chiho Aoshima is a Japanese artist who, with no formal training, became a member of Takashi Murakami’s influential Kaikai Kiki art group. Her work, constructed all in digital art programs, reflects a sort of visionary environment, heavily influenced by Japanese pop cultural media, such as manga, anime, and video games, while not lampooning the media itself, as Murakami and other members of Kaikai Kiki have done in their work. Instead, what is depicted is a sort of bright landscape where a wide variety of elements combine, such as flowers born in skulls, amoebic sky-scrapers, and bright-eyed fairies. I am very much attracted to the sort of “Tokyo” aesthetic in art, while not trying to be fetishistic of a culture. For me, this aesthetic is conveyed through overwhelmingly bright and colorful scenes given a Warholesque bullet-proof sheen of graphic design and advertising, while at the same time representing the various facets, either positive or negative, of a culture really built on this hybrid of tradition and extreme modernism. Plus, I am attracted to figures I see as being on the “outside” of things, and I find her story, coming not from an art-related field and into a prominent position, quite interesting. Regardless, I think the work of Aoshima is significant for that former reason; even though she might not be as adamant in the deconstruction of Japanese popular culture as her mentor, Murakami, her work revolves around the creation of worlds that almost can enter into, one of the fundamentals of artistic creation. Even though this may be a personal bias, the artists that I think are best aren’t necessarily the ones that question everything all the time, or show off a immense technical skill, but create work that describes a sort of internal condition and world view, and Aoshima’s work definitely creates that personal, mental landscape for the viewer to enter into, only blown up to room size using Bezier curves.