In his poem Two Billion Light-Years of Solitude, Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa expressed humanity's musings on the universe. In the vast expanse of the cosmos, Earth is but a drop in the ocean. Throughout history, humans have explored their relationship with nature and society, delved into the connection between the human mindset and the external world, and pondered the interplay of passing time and static existence. Artists serve as vessels of fixed-point observations, keenly capturing and employing diverse media to explore and depict the current state of human society.

Ai☆Madonna’s (b.1984, Tokyo) works portray beautiful girls painted in a characteristic style vividly influenced by Manga. Depicted in cute and sensuous scenes, Ai uses the ‘beautiful girl’ as the medium through which she embodies her own alter ego - regardless of how they are perceived, as long as the beautiful girl achieves perfection, she can express her own voice.

Shuto Okayasu’s (b.1990, Saitama) paintings, deeply influenced by the poems of Shuntaro Tanikawa, ponders on themes such as love, time, human existence, and fate. His practice comprises the endless recording and rebuilding of information to and current behaviours to express the dual relationships between the real and imagined, chaos and harmony; the present and the dream, and the past and the future.

Through the central figure of a curious cloud, Miyu Yamada’s (b.1994, Tokyo) tranquil paintings capture the transient and floating condition which pervades modern society. This theme is reinforced by the artist’s incorporation of sand in her works – symbolic of the boundaries between nature and the city, as well as the inevitability of time and change.

Kazuma Yamamoto’s (b.1998, Tokyo) practice takes the psychology of human behaviours in consumer society as its main theme. Drawing inspiration from popular media sources, his peculiar compositions express the contradictory relationships between ubiquitous human perceptions.

Similarly, Ryohei Nishi’s (b.1999, Shiga) paintings explore the human condition. The artist’s high degree of abstraction portrays uncanny and rough figures which leaves viewers in a state of unease, to parallel the sense of insecurity people experience regarding their own standing in society.

Us solitary humans observe from fixed points on this blue planet, emitting signals that prove our existence. It is a rendezvous of our electric waves – allowing us to coexist upon endless encounters.

EXHIBITING WORKS

ARTISTS

AI☆MADONNA

b. 1984, Tokyo, Japan
Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan

It seems that the reason many creators in all eras drew beautiful girls as “dolls” is they tried to capture the girls’ existence as “things” while removing spirituality in them. In the minds of these creators, there are mixed feelings of longing for the girls and despair that they will never be loved by them.

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Existing “dolled girls” are disassembled by an artist and reconstructed to fit his or her liking. There are many creators who do that. Ai☆Madonna also disassembles and reconstructs beautiful girls, but the reconstruction she tries is the process of dividing parts that are surface features, such as “colors,” “lines,” “shapes” and so on. In this disassembly, there is no sense of violence. What kind of structures are used to draw “angels (beautiful girls)”? Which elements are overlapped to create “angels”?

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Ai☆Madonna disassembles the elements of “beautiful girls” as if she goes back to the microorganisms in the period of the beginning of life, and reconstructs (reincarnates) them as if they were hers. At the same time, her transformed “beautiful girls” release their energy by regenerating into “new beautiful girls.” That is a birth story of new beauty and the essence of Ai☆ Madonna’ s work is to capture the regenerative moment.

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The mysterious healing that one get by looking at Ai☆Madonna’s work seems to be caused by such “joy of birth.”