About Aya Takano
Chiho Aoshima, Mr. and Aya Takano in Lyon
The first room of the exhibition presents Aya Takano's endearing world of noseless, big-eyed girls discovering (hetero/homo)sexuality. Her work finds inspiration in the ukiyo-e and shunga tradition. The manga-like paintings and watercolours elegantly reflect the current Japanese transliteration of the Lolita complex, called Lolicon.
The way she uses diluted paint highlights the sensual simplicity and childish perversion of her portraits. I particularly liked the series of little drawings that come with a very short text relating a sexual experience. Their titles gives you an idea: The First Time I Had An Orgasm Was, A Night of Forbidden Desires, I Felt His Penis Press against My Groin, The First Time I Did It, etc.
Aya Takano At Emmanuel Perrotin
Trained in the popular art form known as kawaii (cute) as an illustrator for Nintendo video games, Aya Takano portrays endearing, wide-eyed androgynous figures with slender bodies, their extremities are systematically reddened, as if to illustrate their extreme sensitivity. For the Japanese, her work is technically irreproachable. Her mastery of drawing and color, combined with her capacity to work exceptionally quickly, is so great that Takashi Murakami has compared her to the brilliant Hokusai, the 18th-century painter and printmaker.
What also contributes to the quality of Aya Takano's work is the breadth and unique aspect of her pictorial world. Inspired by her vivid imagination, she expresses her everyday musings in the form of small preparatory drawings to which she adds her own texts, written with a purity and poetry that is evocative of traditional haiku. She is also an adept of the Japanese practice of customization, and her compositions teem with details. The tattoos on the figures, the patterns on each piece of fabric and the quality of the jewelry and accessories are all backdrops for introducing drawing into the drawing (like her acolyte, Mr.). All these images are then brought together to compose the complex subjects of her large acrylic canvases.
Aya Takano's two-dimensionality has more in common with the graphic work of early Modernism in Europe than it does with current Japanese aesthetics. Her handling and application of materials achieves a distinctly non-flat, aggressive feel. In harsh contrast to the super-controlled lines of Animé, her lines dance, play and wrestle throughout. Her work has a striking resemblance - not only in aesthetics but in subject matter - to that of Egon Schiele (I am forced to bring it up). It is interesting to compare the work of a man living in Vienna during World War I, which depicts girls in sexually charged situations, to work of the same ilk by a young woman in modern Japan.
Aya Takano; Future, Sex and Sadness
I’ve really enjoyed watching the evolution of Japanese artist Aya Takano. She uses acrylic and diluted gouache paints to create fictional, erotic, and sullen images featuring thin, big-eyed Geisha girls– there’s a taste of sex, sadness, and the future all at once.
Perhaps more than any other Kaikai Kiki artist, Takano’s work is the exemplification of Japan’s post-war cultural affluence, and its overwhelmingly diverse, yet aesthetic unification of information. With inspirations varying from 14th Century Italian religious painting to alien evidence to MTV, Takano’s worlds are shiny and futuristic, yet soft and full of traditional and sensual imagery. Her drawings and paintings in which lively, female characters float and contort their waiflike bodies, convey a passionate drive toward creation.
From a Mushroom Cloud, a Burst of Art Reflecting Japan's Psyche
To one side are Aya Takano's drawings and paintings of wide-eyed prepubescent, but sexually knowing, waifs. To the other side, cute goes monstrous in five plush, big-headed puppetlike costumes for yuru chara, regional mascots that represent nearly every local government in Japan. They suggest cuteness as public policy.
A marriage of trauma and kitsch
This peculiar vision of girlhood as a mix of naivete and precocious sexuality recurred in many works in the show. A surprising number are the creations of young women, leading one to wonder if they reflect either an internalization of the messages of an aggressively patriarchal culture or an attempt to slyly subvert the stereotypes that otherwise threaten to imprison these women. Aya Takano, described as a subculture star, creates decorative drawings and paintings of naked or near naked androgynous girls floating in outer space, lolling about in city streets or imaginary landscapes, or, at times, engaged in quotidian activities rendered disturbing by the figures' weirdly inappropriate responses. In one drawing a girl gazes in distress at a bloody tampon, while in another a pair of naked girls engage in what may be a sexual encounter on a toilet.
It happens sometimes that the pupil overcomes the master. And there we have Aya Takano, a new target in the visual arts worldwide. This japanese pop artist born in 1.976 is conquering the arty spectrum with her subversive femenine vision and her science fiction moto. She´s been influenced by otaku culture, shiny and futuristic worlds, “girl´s photography”, japanese images and Italian Quattrocento. Her teenagers live in onanist bubbles. These heroines are always painted in ink and acrylics to get a soft and dreamy look. Her works appear to be simple but they hide a pretty virtuosism taken from her comic author side. In fact in her country she is better known for her comic works, whereas in old Europe she is considered an artist.
