Debuting in the art scene with no formal art training, Chiho Aoshima’s work transcends traditional techniques of representation. Aoshima uses computer software to create beautiful and erotic worlds of ghosts, demons, schoolgirls, and exquisite natural landscapes.
Her work is printable on any surface; from canvas bags to giant wallpaper installations. “My work feels like strands of my thoughts that have flown around the universe before coming back to materialize,” Aoshima states.
Chiho Aoshima. Blum & Poe Gallery, Los Angeles
For the past several years Aoshima has worked as an artist and in-house computer technician for Takashi Murakami, the progenitor of Superflat, at his Hiropon Factory in Tokyo. Though she was never formally trained, she possesses an awe-inspiring eye for detail. From these works installed chronologically in the gallery’s two rooms the rapid evolution and increasing complexity of her vision are evident. Paradise (1999), the show’s earliest piece, is also its most conventional, despite the proliferation of naked girls lolling with fauns next to a rainbow-lit stream. Her obsessive attention to detail and attraction to the morbid is well illustrated in Mushroom Room (2000). Within a dripping violet and purple annulus a naked girl lies on her back in bed, staring wide-eyed up at the ceiling as a multitude of spotted mushrooms colonize her room. Next to the bed is a stack of books, whose titles seem to mirror the girl’s mute thoughts – Don’t Die, I Want To Go Somewhere For Play and When Will You Make It Wait For Me?
each of the seventeen platform arches contains part of an elaborate composition. it's a landscape that gradually transforms from day to night and from an urban to rural landscape. the vibrant colors keep the viewers gaze.
the piece shows a timeless world created by contemporary technology. it suggests a utopian vision of the earth in which the past and the future have merged and the boundaries between organic creatures and inanimate things have broken down. the animal, the plant and the man-made and life is literally breathed into each building and mountain.
"City Glow", Chiho Aoshima (2005)
City Glow, installed near the N-R subway lines, is a multi-panel graphic work in which futuristic skyscrapers--transformed into demure, humanlike creatures--stand amidst lush tropical vegetation. Source: Public Art Fund press release.
With a mastery of computer technology and a vocabulary of images drawn from Japanese comics and animation, the Tokyo artist Chiho Aoshima creates fantasy worlds in which hybridized creatures are participants in the composition's narrative as well as elements in a decorative scheme. Magma Spirit Explodes. Tsunami Is Dreadful, a mural that spans a 40-foot wall, is a narrative of almost cinematic scope and complexity. Nature and humanity wreak havoc in myriad ways, from tidal waves to fiery conflagrations and war. These disasters, however, have been carefully choreographed; bright flames to the left of the composition give way in effortless transition to volcanic puffs of smoke that are in turn transformed into the blue-green expanse of a tsunami. At the center of the mural, a giantess presides; she displays the round-eyed prettiness and flowing hair of a stereotypical animé ingénue. Belching smoke and snorting flames, arms and hair tendrils flailing wildly, she is soul and mistress of the mayhem, alluringly beautiful yet terrible in her anger.
Surreal Japanese graphics at the Baltic
There’s something overwhelming about Chiho Aoshima’s work. Her giant surreal fantasyscapes hit the viewer with a fluid, saccharine, manga pop. Death and cute imagery sit side by side. In this show, tower blocks are transformed into swaying forms like anemones in an odd garden. Mummified and bloody girls swim in a fractal swirl of psychedelic colours. Vampiric women flow out of forests with unreal dayglo tendrils. One of the real draws is the multi-screen animated film installation at the back of the floor. Here her work begins to literally sway. Buildings are given sirens’ faces and placed in an almost too lush tropicalia landscape.
PARIS///INSIDE CHIHO AOSHIMA’S SUPERFLAT FLOATING WORLD…
Japanese Pop artist and Takashi Murakami disciple CHIHO AOSHIMA unveiled a phenomenal & eponymous show of new work at Paris’ GALERIE EMMANUEL PERROTIN last week. Blending her influences of modern anime/manga and classical ukiyo-e printmaking, Aoshima has forged her own “Superflat floating world” that incorporates traditional Japanese themes of nature and the sprit world with futuristic visions of alien life and humanized cityscapes that is truly unique. Known mostly for her stunning, large-scale results using digital tools, Aoshima proves her technical prowess in this show by displaying several delicately rendered watercolor-on-paper pieces that bring a softer, more human quality to her otherwise sharp edged work in Illustrator…
Chiho Aoshima began working with Murakami in the late 1990s, and in 1999 she began to exhibit independently as well. Using the computer as a compositional tool, Aoshima realizes her images freely in various media, including sculpture, mural design, prints, clothing, and, in collaboration with animator Bruce Ferguson, video. Her imagery draws upon traditional Japanese scroll paintings as well as contemporary sources, blending landscape and narrative to create a vision of our planet´s potential for both creation and chaos.
Chiho Aoshima at Gloucester Road station
Gloucester Road tube station has been the focal point of Transport for London’s “Platform for Art” scheme for years suited, as it is, by having a spare platform which passengers never use as well as a large series of arches which artists seem to be very successful at fitting their material into. The new exhibition at the station opens officially on the 25th July and is by contemporary Japanese artist Chiho Aoshima. I had no idea that a new exihibit had even been put up until I was wandering out this afternoon with no particular agenda and saw a poster.
1. What are you working on right now?
I'm working on a new animation. It's the animated version of my piece that's up at the Boston ICA.
2. What has been inspiring you lately?
The daybreak that I saw from the airplane window.
3. Who are your heroes?
The father in the Little House on the Prairie.
4. Describe your aesthetic.
Never resisting nature, grateful for everything I have.
5. What are you doing in Miami?
I'm going around looking at art fairs. This is the first time I've been to Miami, but I really like both the atmosphere of the town—a mixture of splendor and old-time—and also the smell of the wind.
Chiho Aoshima: City Glow at MFAH
There are obvious art-historical precedents. Japanese folding screens and scroll paintings, and their postwar low-culture counterparts Japanese comic books and animated films, which you must never forget to refer to by their Japanese names: manga and anime, lest you imply that they are somehow anything less than an autonomous world, truly understood only by its fans, and insulated from criticism by outsiders.
