Chiho Aoshima garnered international attention for her large-scale “City Glow” installations in New York City’s 14th Street/Union Square subway station in 2005 and West London’s Gloucester Road Underground Station in 2006.
Chiho Aoshima’s artwork invites you into a world that is impossibly believable. Although her vibrant dreamscapes are sometimes described as dark and even unsettling, Aoshima somehow manages to convey a tone of detached innocence in her renderings, almost as if the artist is a childlike spectator in a world of her own making.
Utilizing computer software, Aoshima creates elaborate, colourful fantasy worlds where elements of anime, mythology, erotica, and surrealism converge against the backdrop of exquisitely designed landscapes. Her work is infused with a whimsical curiosity, yet the various spectres, demons, and lolicom-inspired schoolgirls that inhabit her ethereal environments explore the darker side of Japanese pop culture.
Although Chiho Aoshima received no formal training in art, she developed a passion for creative expression while earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics at Hosei University. Recognising that Economics was not her primary field of interest–in her own words, she was “bored to death”–Aoshima began working for famed Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, and was eventually welcomed into his highly acclaimed Kaikai Kiki collective. Aoshima has since displayed her printed works on surfaces of all kinds, including paper, plexiglass, canvas, and aluminium.
Chiho Aoshima is once again offering the art world a glimpse of her unique vision with her first solo exhibition in nearly 7 years entitled “Rebirth of the World“, which is now on display at the Seattle Art Museum. In her signature superflat style, Aoshima provides viewers with a series of alternate realities and possible futures where man-made structures take on organic characteristics, and nature begins to fuse with technology in surprisingly convincing ways. Aoshima is in many respects a master architect of provocative dream worlds that challenge the imagination and skilfully bridge the gap between fantasy and reality.
View our fine selection of Chiho Aoshima prints available at: http://www.kumicontemporary.com/artwork/chiho-aoshima.html
