Ai Ohkawara “On the Means of Turning the Silence That Lingers on the Eardrum into Gentleness”
I visited Ai Ohkawara’s solo exhibition “On the Means of Turning the Silence That Lingers on the Eardrum into Gentleness.”
The venue is the Art Gallery on the 10th floor of Shinjuku Takashimaya.
Approximately 30 works were on view at the exhibition.
Because the Shinjuku Takashimaya Art Gallery is a spacious venue, the artist has to prepare a large number of works, which must be quite demanding.
Using a variety of materials and techniques, she showed a broad range of works, though the show was centered on her oil paintings.
She treats art as an “apparatus that stimulates vision” in order to expose the dark, unstable parts of the human psyche, and she continues to produce work along those lines.
There were also canvas works, but these particular pieces are made on board with paper affixed to it, prepared with a technique called “emulsion ground.”
“Emulsion ground,” a technique also used by Western Renaissance painters, is a method of applying animal glue to strengthen the ground. It is a highly meticulous process.
Ai Ohkawara names Jenny Saville and Francis Bacon as her favorite artists, and one can sense their influence in her work.
The collage works, made with beeswax, charcoal, and paint, were also fascinating.
Their reasonable prices made it easy to understand why the series is so popular.
With a touch that oscillates between delicacy and boldness, moving across oil painting, drawing, and collage, this was a solo exhibition that showed the artist’s broad range.
I hear that she participates at Art Fair Tokyo every year with NODA CONTEMPORARY.
An artist whose future is very much worth watching.
