Chiho Aoshima's Surreal Dreams

Chiho Aoshima

"My work feels like strands of my thoughts that have flown around the universe before coming back to materialize," Chiho Aoshima said to explain her artwork.  Aoshima is a Japanese graphic pop artist, classified as Superflat, a term to describe postmodern art movement started by Takashi Murakami.  In Aoshima's artwork, she creates dreamscapes and surreal scenes with wild landscapes and mostly a young woman, where she uses demons, ghosts, and nature.  The mediums used to create her work is large scale printing from her images she produces, in addition to plastics and leather to give the images more depth.  Aoshima's art is exhibited all over the world, including New York City and London subway stations, which her largest works of art spans 4.8 meters high and 32.5 meters long.

Magma Spirit Explodes: Tsunami is Dreadful, Chiho Aoshima

In Aoshima's Magma Spirit Explodes: Tsunami is Dreadful (2004), she exhibits and grabs our attention by showing chaos in an urban society where anything could happen within anyone's imagination.  Since this imagery is portrayed in modern society, it shows us life struggles as apart of contemporary culture.  In addition, it also represents the death of civilization, which the subject of the young woman burning in the flames of her own surroundings.

City Glow: Mountain Whisper, Chiho Aoshima

Further into her large-scale digital scroll prints, the City Glow series consists of solo projects she was commissioned by London and later animation clips of her artwork representing the urban underground.  Mountain Whisper, a 17 panel separations, are located under brick arches in a subway station in London, while train passengers can view the alien-like children heads that sit on top of city skyscrapers.  As these panels morph into wildlife landscapes, the alien heads continue to sit on top of the mountains.  With the utopian and apolitical visions of earth, City Glow separates the past and present with the human faces breathing into man-made and/or industrial materials.  Later on, these images became animations, which shows more detail from the original prints.

The Divine Gas, Chiho Aoshima

Aoshima renders another large-scale print, The Divine Gas, a young girl lays in the grass done for The Institute of Contemporary Art – Boston.  This artwork was drawn on a Mac G4 computer and printed on vinyl to capture the details in the graphics and vibrant colors.  The spectator is again taken away by daydreams and opposite forces of good and evil among the beauty and darkness shown in the image.  Since all of these elements seem deep-rooted, she creates humor out of the clouds coming from her bottom.  Some suggest this image comes from Bosch's the mysterious tale, Garden of Earthly Delights.