The Unknown Self
Aoshima In, and On, Process
By Carlo McCormick photographs by
mark lyon
It is all too easy and familiar for us to
accept painting as a picture window into some visual space
beyond. When Chiho Aoshima takes over an exhibition space on
the scale of Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin for one of her more epic
installations, then, we are at least reminded of the pictorial
stakes involved. No longer simply views into another world,
Aoshima’s installations invoke an alternate universe that
literally occupies and subsumes our own. At once familiar and
foreign, beautiful and terrifying, her visions offer a sense of
identification amid a disorienting swirl of the uncanny. When
we asked her how this dislocation between recognition and
wonder functions so closely to the language of dreams, the
Tokyo-based Aoshima told us through a translator, “I have
a lot of strange dreams. Worlds and events that I could never
have imagined myself, that I just cannot believe are part of my
subconscious. I guess everyone is like that.” Well, not
exactly, but however unearthly her realms of unreason may be,
they do make a certain kind of sense that remains accessible to
most viewers.
Much like her mentor, Takashi Murakami,
for whom she still works as part of his globally expansive
Kaikai Kiki Studios, Aoshima manages to deftly integrate
irrational imagery within a quite rigid pictorial formalism. We
do not believe her art because it is rendered with the
verisimilitude of Surrealism, but rather because of its
fluidity and fluency in our larger cultural language of
representation. One of the most noted of the
“Superflat” artists launched out of Japan at the
start of this century (the exhibition of that title toured
museums in the United States in 2001), Aoshima has all the pop
poetics of her peers in bringing the visual tropes of manga,
anime, and other otaku-driven fantasy visuals to fine art, but
she does so with a remarkably less mediated voice that is
uncannily introspective and personal. This sense of self,
certainly in the ways that her art is so idiosyncratic (without
being quite so emblematic as that of Murakami or hysterical as
that of her studio-mate Mr.), is itself still at a remove.
Perhaps its dislocation from raw emotion — argued in the
last of Murakami’s Superflat trilogy of exhibitions
(“Little Boy”) as a kind of primal regression into
escapist infantilism in the wake of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
atomic bombs — is, in fact, mimetically akin to the
slippage of identity registered in today’s late
capitalism. But when Aoshima expands upon her own relation to
this subliminal mindscape, memory is something of a Proustian
trigger, not in search of what is there but what is lost. She
says, “Though I don’t analyze my dreams, I am very
interested in the idea of an unknown me, or a forgotten me.
Sometimes I try to find inspiration to make works in
remembering a particular smell, the ambiguous recollection of
an atmosphere, or a moment when there was something that I
couldn’t understand.”
To dream of what is lost, or
“forgotten,” is, in behavioral or archetypal terms,
to seek the impossible recovery of that most precious
quotient: innocence. This dynamic, between unknowing and
knowing better, is the pivot on which Aoshima’s work
rotates, and it is precisely her capacity to grant the ideal
within a spectrum that is perversely and pervasively haunted
that infuses her paintings and sculptures with a provocative
frisson. Her work is neither as compelled by fictions as much
as one might presume of art that so clearly extends from
cartoon and comic book traditions, nor is it in the service of
some greater truth. The honesty here, often quite painful at
times, is more a metaphorical manifestation of the perceptual
miasma born of the immense difficulty we all experience to some
extent when trying to navigate our own objective understanding
in a sea of subjectivities. This, it would seem to me, has as
much to do with the air of suspension, the floating of
possibilities, in Aoshima’s dynamically attenuated
mythologies as with what we must already by this point in her
career describe as her style.
Winter 2008
