City Glow Video By Japanese Pop Art Star

One of the most celebrated landmarks of contemporary Japanese Pop Art since it was first introduced to international audiences in 2005, the monumental video City Glow by the Japanese Pop Art star Chiho Aoshima will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from January 27 to April 29, 2007, in the lower corridor of the Audrey Jones Beck Building. Spanning five video screens, it has been described by the Los Angeles Times´ Christopher Knight as "a post-modern Japanese screen painting."

The installation has been made possible through the generosity of local collectors Robert, Jereann, and Holland Chaney, who have lent this masterpiece to the MFAH. It is borrowed from their outstanding collection of contemporary Asian art, which now ranks as one of the best in America.

City Glow, 2005, is both epic and playfully engaging. Running seven minutes long, Aoshima´s fantastic narrative opens in a garden, filled with exotic foliage and creatures. Slowly, a modern city with living skyscrapers grows from this Edenic paradise, and then as night falls, nature takes over once again. Aoshima populates this landscape with both the forces of good and evil: a graveyard filled with demonic ghosts is ultimately banished by fairytale spirits and a new dawn. Repeating in cycles, Aoshima´s poetic reverie on evolution can be understood as a commentary on the perils of global warming. Ultimately, however, City Glow offers a promise of hope and regeneration.

Aoshima has stated, "City Glow was born from the sensation of release that I felt gazing upon the Hong Kong Bay Area. A spirit lives in the buildings, as they sway gently under the starry sky. Buildings bear the wind and play with the birds that fly around them. Of all of human creations, they exist closest to nature."

"City Glow has a fresh, vivid look which frees the viewer from the hum-drum everyday and replaces it with joy," said MFAH director Peter C. Marzio. "I am reminded so much of the great American comic-strip classics of Winsor McCay´s Little Nemo in Slumberland."

"Aoshima´s witty animation is a delight to all ages, uniting the vivid graphic conventions of contemporary anime with ancient traditions in Japanese art and thought," adds Alison de Lima Greene, MFAH curator of contemporary art and special projects. "Her understanding and celebration of nature in all its aspects is both haunting and inspiring."

Aoshima is a member of the unique artists´ collective created by Tokyo artist Takashi Murakami. In 1996 Murakami established the Hiropon Factory (later renamed Kaikai Kiki), a studio dedicated to producing his increasingly large-scale sculptures and paintings. Working with a select group of extraordinarily talented young assistants, Murakami promoted a fresh approach to art and commerce. His efforts produced a dynamic new wave of Japanese Pop Art, embracing the pictorial style of manga (comic books) and anime (cartoons), all within the spirit of kawaii or cuteness. Japanese Pop Art has since become one of the most vital currents in today´s international scene and many of Murakami´s assistants have emerged as important artists in their own right.

Initially a student of economics, Tokyo-born Aoshima began working with Murakami in the late 1990s; in 1999 she began to exhibit independently as well. Using the computer as a compositional tool, Aoshima realizes her images freely in various media, including sculpture, mural design, prints, clothing, and, in collaboration with animator Bruce Ferguson, video. Her imagery draws upon traditional Japanese scroll paintings as well as contemporary sources, blending landscape and narrative to create a vision of our planet´s potential for both creation and chaos. -- www.mfah.org