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REVIEW丨Asami KIYOKAWA - Incarnation

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1Installation View of Incarnation at ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI, 2019 ? Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

Asami KIYOKAWA：Incarnation

Article / 巢佳幸 CHAO Jiaxing

Translator / 贺潇 Fiona HE

Mythology: Bishin (Graces) | 2019 | Canvas, embroidery thread | 181.8 x 251.8 x 3.9 cm ? The Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

At Rashomon Kyoto in the Heian era, an old lady tried to pull the long hair off an unidentified body so it could be made into a wig in exchange for some money. Asami Kiyowaka’s naming for Bishin in her Mythology series and these strange images remind one of this compelling scene in Rashomon. Akuta Ryonosuke presented extremely ambivalent facets of humanity through the devious doings in the name of survival, taking place in Kyoto, Japan after the disaster. After WWII, Japan was undergoing a general spiritual crisis, erupting widely due to the abrupt destabilization of the class system, which led to the formation of the aesthetics of the decadant. Although while both Akuta Ryonosuke and Dazai Osamu were products of different historical periods, they appeared subtly through the artist’s implied representations. The appeal of Japanese writers from that period is in the infusion of the vice and gloom troubling their hearts and minds translated through literature. Here, this seemingly fictional atmosphere depicting femme fatale is sublimated. Some of the female characters reveal dispositions related to love, charm, and death. In addition, the artist attempted to adopt vibrant and colorful embroidery as a means of intervention, whose hands-on handicraft undermines these fictional stories with those distinct decorative motifs such as, plants, flowers, animals, clouds and ocean waves. I remember in the dim scene of The Setting Sun, in which the female character is given a wonderful glow, the mother of the female protagonist Kazuko preserved all the dignity and elegance of the nobility until her death, in spite of falling in love with a libertine, nevertheless conceived it as a wonderful experience. These messages remind us that, be it famous Japanese novels, Faust or Aesop’s Fables, in essence they are fictions about femininity.

11Installation View of Our Story Series at ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI, 2019 ? Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

Similar to Akuta Ryonosuke and Dazai Osamu, 20th Century Japanese writers such as, Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata continue to impact the Japanese or even world literature, who invariably have chosen suicide to end their own lives, with them, ending the tragedy of those they portrayed and their own. The transformation of social values projected through the personalities and stories they portrayed have also had an aesthetic impact, which transformed every Japanese, including the artist, Asami Kiyokawa. By adopting the thread as an approach to intervening in these novels, for Our Story series, she used various colors of embroidery thread in bringing together the connections of the characters and words into a pattern of motifs or identifiable images or drawings. Here, the needle still embodies decorative techniques that seem rather refreshing and has strong compositional potentials, adding a formal sense to the books. For this reason, the thread seems quite imposing, of course, the powerful message in the book diminishes, and becomes isolated and fragile. In addition, the artist’s body also becomes rather fragile. Hence, needle and thread, books, and the body form into a unique tension.

In fact, there are many artists in Mainland China, Taiwan, Indian and South America, who adopt needle and thread as their artistic mean. For example, the Chinese artist Lin Tianmiao, who often uses needle, cotton, thread, silk, fabric and other materials that are intimately tied to feminist symbolism. Lin uses these materials to enwrap everyday items to suggest the entanglement of feminine signs, social value, and the everyday. In even more extreme cases, at the 2017 Venice Biennale entitled Viva Arte Viva to expound on the origin of art and legendary narratives, many works adopting thread and needle, fabric, textile were included in the exhibition, among them is the Taiwanese American artist, Mingwei Li’s The Mending Project, every piece of clothing is attached to the wall with a color thread, which conjures into a rainbow, that contrast to the notion of mending in social narration. Indeed, most of the practices that rely on these materials infer to the grand narratives of mythology and femininity.

1Installation View of Series of Mutant, Life, Complex and Tokyo Monster at ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI, 2019 ? Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

Aesop's Fable_Aesop | 2016 | Book, embroidery thread | 14.8 x 21 cm ? The Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

Faust1_Goethe | 2016 | Book, embroidery thread | 14.8 x 21 cm ? The Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

Along this path in her practice, or perhaps it was due to her background experience in design and commercial modeling for fashion magazines, Kiyokawa is keen on using thread and needle to create new images that would alter our everyday image (found images and fashion photography). Her Mutant and Complex series especially highlight this interest. The artist chose a series of photographs of women portrayed similar to those in fashion magazines, and uses embroidery to reconfigure the glamour, chaos, illusory East Asian visual effects while preserving metaphorical flares. We could look back on her Aesop’s Fable and Faust_Goethe, which were both, in fact, mundane fables that are isolated from personification and mythical narratives. Her direct use of persona – especially female figures, unrelated to the title of the exhibition, are closely related to Japanese anime. However Tezuka Osamu’s anime Faust demonstrated the MGM studio style at its height. Kiyokawa chose these styles is aimed to embody a romantic atmosphere, instead it’s the Czech illustrator Alfons Maria Mucha’s artistic style. As it’s widely known that Mucha’s posters, often portraying elegant women in beautiful silhouettes. The objects on those imageries respectively presented a roster of significances, for instance, plants suggest nature, figuration person, light god, symmetry order, sexuality desire, mystery desire for death. These imageries have had a tremendous impact on the making of young girl anime.

1Installation View of Tokyo Monster Series, 2019 ? Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

However, these imposing lines the artist has created give a sense of order, some neat and symmetrical. Even though the imageries rendered with thread and needle may seem relaxed, distinct, expansive and charming, for instance in the two series, Tokyo Monster and Life, portraying the urban features of Tokyo residents, their intense yet orderly imageries are isolated from those on the photographs. In this sense, this approach provides evidence that the artist’s practice is not a way to release her own emotions, but rather, to embody the states of oppression, reticence, and confinement. The sources of these manifestations demonstrate distinct power for self-control. In fact, the lines are charged with a power of oppression, order and “self-transcendence”. As if the artist took the thread as a means to search for the maxims in the books, to look for sacredness through order and symmetry, and the female flesh is a way to discover the “transcendence” of one’s own body. This transcendence, unlike in the general sense, is built on abstract elements, isolated from social factors, that points directly to the sacred. Here, “sacredness” and “transcendence” are synonymous, both are goals of incarnation.