細川真希
Maki Hosokawa
關於
The paintings of Maki Hosokawa possess an extremely pure and cynical charm. Not only do they depict an honest, free, and beautiful world, like something a child might depict, they are also symbolically reflective of a contemporary Japanese society in which the body’s physicality has been rendered tenuous by highly information-oriented society.
Hosokawa creates her works based on private diaries, ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and Western paintings. In her paintings, which are drawn from pure concepts unbound by Western philosophies of art or Japanese theories of painting, always appear human figures, often young girls with large eyes, fine noses and mouths, and long slender arms and legs. Somewhat like fairies appearing within fantasies, these figures are living out lives of dream in the middle of the city, or are drawn somehow from figures appearing in famous historical pieces. By incorporating these human figures into both urban backdrops and scenes from great Western and Eastern historical masterpieces, Hosokawa achieves her own contemporary expression of the scenes of daily life from the Impressionists, of the classical balance of the Renaissance, and the sophistication of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. These could also be viewed as notes made for the purpose of capturing the small joys found within daily life. Herein are depicted the beauty, liberty, humor, and happiness discovered by her contemporaries in this young generation, as well as the evanescence of life, its wretched passivity, and the fragility of existence. Furthermore, the sensitivity and purity of Hosokawa’s expression encompasses a cold and objective critique of human life in modern times.
For example, almost all of her human figures are asexual girls, and when boys appear, they do not differ too greatly from the girls in physique. These human figures, melding roundness of form and softness of color, are patterned; it feels almost as if the same individual is simply changing her clothes and hair. Neutral and de-individuated figures which might exist anywhere... In the midst of virtual worlds created by digital media, transcending individual physicality, it is as if Hosokawa is expressing an awareness of a humanity fragmenting, proliferating, and changing into diverse forms. Just as artists such as Hokusai, Da Vinci, Picasso, Warhol, and Yoshitomo Nara came to reflect their respective ages in their depictions of the human body, Hosokawa’s works capture the spirit of the cyber-age, located on the leading edge of art history.
Since birth, Maki Hosokawa has been constantly swimming in a sea of information built up of a massive inflow of all kinds of images. Through the works of Hosokawa, which play so innocently with this world of diverse simulations, we glimpse the bewildering newness awaiting the human race, and we acquire an essential perspective for our society, in which multiple and diverse values now run parallel.