黑料不打烊

This exhibition juxtaposes contemporary works by Aoshima Chiho with a variety of Japanese prints from the 19th-21st centuries to reveal common threads in imagery and design. Aoshima鈥檚 fertile imagination spawns disturbing and yet cute, brightly colored visions that she designs using computer software and produces at monumental scale. Informed by traditional Buddhist hell scrolls, ghost pictures, ukiyo-e prints, manga, and anime, she populates her creations with frightening apparitions and winsome female sprites, conveying tensions between humans and the natural world. Many of her motifs echo earlier subject matter such as landscapes, tsunami, and flames, and also Japan鈥檚 rich trove of eerie stories. The two featured works by Aoshima are generous loans from John L. Bloch, and many of the Japanese prints are recent gifts or loans from the distinguished collections of Lee & Mary Jean Michels, Irwin Lavenberg, and Peter DeFazio.

This exhibition also includes examples of painting, sculpture, textiles, and decorative art from the museum鈥檚 permanent collection, along with recent works by Murakami Takashi and other modern and contemporary artists, playful examples of privately printed votive slips (senjafuda or n艒satsu) depicting Japanese monsters (y艒kai), and a selection of exquisite katagami textile stencils and tools from an important collection recently donated by Susanna Campbell Kuo.