These faces unabashedly express familiar emotions and recognizable yearning, adding to their strangeness when depicted in near-monstrous forms. Saki Kitamura’s “Grasslands and Galaxy II” depicts a girl crouching on what could be a windowsill, her glittering green eyes desiring to escape into an alternate reality. The frantic energy held within the print’s intersecting lines mirror the expression of its subject’s face. In Kentaro Takano’s “Scream,” a face wrinkled in anguish and agony comes into being through fevered squiggles. Hitomi Yoshida, “Flow,” 2013, woodcut (Photo: BETTY HE/The Stanford Daily)Īn unsettling effect of metamorphosis is also apparent in the copious renderings of faces in the exhibition. Kiyoko Hagino, “Conference 5,” 2009, woodcut (Photo: BETTY HE/The Stanford Daily)
The printmakers demonstrate an awareness of their own medium - the solidity of wood and metal molds melts into ink, and that ink in turn forms embodied entities and recreates material texture. These prints play out the process of meaning coming into being within representational art, while evoking the constant threat of meaning disintegrating. Its dissolution into meaningless shapes shows that it is nothing more than mere ink, dripping down or darting across the page. By depicting the body’s decomposition into a pattern of abstract shapes or absorption into its natural surroundings, the artists ponder the breakdown of the body’s boundaries. Similarly, in Hitomi Yoshida’s “Flow,” a human body merges with a mass of corals and shells.
Standing in the cocoon of two conjoined trees, the girl morphs into a plant-like life form. In Kiyoko Hagino’s “Conference 5,” a girl’s flesh melts into nondescript droplets that drip down her body and then blossom at the forest floor. Saori Sinkawa, “Electric Train,” 2016, etching (Photo: BETTY HE/The Stanford Daily)Īccompanying this transformation of familiar settings into a fantastical realm is a fascination with metamorphosis. A sleepy tranquility permeates the train car and draws us into a somnambulist’s world. Sinkawa’s attention to verticality, from the dangling tentacles to the handrails to the stripes on the seats, gives the print a sense of heaviness, as if everything within it is pulled down by gravity. However, these streaks also resemble streaming tears that unexpectedly humanize her.
Upon closer inspection, we realize that she is a robot too - the vertical streaks running down her face suggest that she is metallic. Sitting next to a character with an industrial contraption as its head, a girl pensively looks at her phone. Behind a row of hanging handlebars, a cluster of tentacle-like cords intrudes into a train car, representing the presence of the otherworldly within seemingly normal settings. In “Electric Train,” Saori Sinkawa creates a world composed of cold and metallic electronic gadgets that still retains a deep sense of humanity. Many of the pieces depict fantastical worlds by taking details from our everyday lives and altering them. Despite their differences, the prints all unsettle reality and question the premises of the world we live in. The exhibition features a diverse selection of works ranging in style from hyper-real to completely abstract, all executed with extraordinary quality and incredible detail. This connection was established by the friendship between Reiko Oshima, who has served as a print show director and president for the College Women’s Association of Japan (CWAJ), and Sally Porter, who was previously a CWAJ affiliate and now works as a docent at Cantor Arts Center. 3 at the Stanford Art Gallery, and the exhibition showcases ten years of prints made by undergraduate and graduate students from Tama Art University, one of Japan’s leading art schools.Įvery year since 2009, Tama Art University has sent a box of its students’ prints to Stanford.
#Tokyo school life patch full#
“ Full of Autumnal Scent” is on view from Nov. Ayako Hasegawa, “Full of Autumnal Scent,” 2009, lithograph, woodcut with water-based ink (Photo courtesy of Yuri Hobart)Ī flurry of green descends from a gradient of burnt orange melting into yellow, like leaves swirling down from a November sky.