Aki Moriyama “image”
I visited Aki Moriyama’s solo exhibition “image.” The venue is MEDEL GALLERY SHU.
Aki Moriyama, an artist who completed her studies at Tokyo University of the Arts this spring, has been producing paintings using dolls as motifs. Her most recent showing was her graduation exhibition, held about two months before this show.
This exhibition presents more than 20 new and existing works painted under the theme of “image.”
The painted doll interrogates the subjecthood of the “I.”
Using dolls, I express the “human drama” in painting. Dolls are very close to human beings.
And yet, they are ultimately not people, and neither male nor female. They are human-like yet objects.
Dolls have no movement. If anything, that makes them seem more expressive than humans.
They speak no lines. They have no facial expressions. That stimulates the viewer’s imagination and expands the image before their eyes.
To make a doll — an object — appear as if life dwells within, one must ask how strongly one can consciously imbue the painting with a sense of fantasy.
The reason I paint dolls is because I believe dolls can express what human gestures alone cannot.
By painting dolls, I want to raise fundamental questions about the ways in which humans exist — identity, consciousness, body, and so on.Aki Moriyama | AKI MORIYAMA (MOYAN)
Right: Aki Moriyama, “image,” 2019
Right: Aki Moriyama, “Birth,” 2019
By selecting iconic toys for girls such as Licca-chan and Barbie dolls as her motifs, Moriyama paints under themes centered on gender and human diversity. Through depicting dolls that persist across eras and national borders, her work leads to fundamental questions about the ways human beings exist.
