Chiho Aoshima’s Ceramic Daydreams in Aquatic Blue

Two transformative life decisions in Chiho Aoshima’s life play their parts in her ongoing exhibition, Emptinesses, at Perrotin. About a year ago, the artist bought her own kiln which freed her from traveling between fellow artists’ kilned studios to make sculptures. The newcomer at her studio has also granted Aoshima with the freedom to “make a lot of mistakes,” she says. More importantly, the mistakes also promise “the happiness to get it right,” while working with her own small kiln. The other decision—which she made a few years ago—was her move from Tokyo to Kyoto where she can see “the wide open sky even in the city.” The nearby mountains topped with cartoon-perfect clouds also remind Aoshima the reality that “there must have been more beautiful sceneries and skies in the past,” before chunks of urbanism infiltrated into the nature’s serenity: “I think that must have been enough to make me think that I should try my best to live my life.”   

This devotion to drench herself with the very instance of a day-to-day existence anchors the show’s blue and white-washed ceramics and vibrant acrylic paintings. The installation of serenely-placed sculptures fills a gallery—a multi-faceted equilibrium lingers around demure girls depicted over the fluidly-shaped forms. Blue and white thrive in their harmony, as well as function and imagination—and there is fear and hope, too. A duo of larger scale totemic ceramics guards the constellation of smaller pedestal pieces, as well as mid-scale floor works. Over them, girls—determinedly contemplative and aloofly present—possess gentile postures while inhabiting flora-dense landscapes. I Hope Something Good Happens and A God of Birds Appears (both 2022) both reach a child’s height, with cartoonish heroines plunged in azure faunas. 

Aoshima’s forms embody mythical potentials, veering away from the limits of the discernible realm towards a slow-paced fable. A Nap in the Flower Field (2021) is a doe-eyed girl exercising the titular repose with flowers crawling around her body and hair. Indeed, most of the artist’s sculptures moonlight as vases. Lush flowers or brittle weeds live inside their emptinesses; life and death coexist while the girls—or many version of a girl—inhabit her own time and place. 

Coming from a body of work in the Murakami-led Superflat movement, Aoshima here takes a tangible turn but she keeps her journey with clay and kiln fluid. The sculptures are biomorphic, comforting, and at times perplexing; they convey a sense of aquatic malleability, like the surface of a placid lake. The girls’ resemblance to reflections on the water is therefore clear: they are heroines of the open-ended tales which they daydream under the open sky or by a burning kiln.    

Written by Osman Can Yerebakan