Exhibition Information

Emi Kuraya. Pigtails, 2020.
©2020 Emi Kuraya/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin. Oil on canvas. 130 x 80.3cm | 51 3/16 x 31 5/8 in.

Emi Kuraya. Pierced Ears, 2020.
©2020 Emi Kuraya/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin. Oil on canvas. 130 x 80.3cm | 51 3/16 x 31 5/8 in

Emi Kuraya. Untitled, 2020.
©2020 Emi Kuraya/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin. Pen and watercolor on paper. 18.7 x 14.7cm | 7 3/8 x 5 13/16 in.

Emi Kuraya. Untitled, 2020.
©2020 Emi Kuraya/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin. Pencil and watercolor on paper. 12.5 x 17.8cm | 4 15/16 x7 1/16 in.

			Member since 2018 of Kaikai Kiki, the art production and artists’ management
group founded by Takashi Murakami in Japan, Emi Kuraya, born in 1995, is one
of the most interesting and refreshing new voices in the contemporary
Japanese art panorama. A graduate of Tokyo’s Tama Art University, in spite of
her young age Kuraya has already had a few high-prole solo shows, in Japan,
and has been exhibited at the Hong Kong edition of Art Basel and also at Frieze
New York, receiving wide acclaim for the freshness, and the deep layers of
meaning that make her work so captivating.
Her oil paintings of teenage female characters transx on the canvas the gaze of
the viewer, as they emanate a sense of both familiarity and unease: Kuraya’s
girls, which she has described as being a kind of pictorial diary of her own daily
feelings and experiences, stare back at the viewer with their enormous eyes,
questioning us, their surroundings and themselves at the same time. The
features of Kuraya’s girls obviously owe a lot to Japan’s manga (cartoon)
tradition, with their large heads and tiny, nearly invisible mouth and wide eyes,
the thin line that draws their contours and their long, ephebic limbs. The
cultural impact of manga, one of the most sustained and ubiquitous popular
Japanese artforms of recent decades, can never be underestimated in contemporary
Japanese art, in all its unending variations. In the case of Kuraya, though, unlike
in most manga drawings the often bleak backgrounds against which her female
gures sit are as revelatory as the gures themselves. In many works Kuraya’s
characters are positioned right in the middle of very large canvases, and the
backgrounds are more than just a space-ller, oering a much deeper glimpse
into the world in which the characters move and emerge from. They are urban
landscapes and locales in shades of pastel blue-grey, that Kuraya doesn’t
romanticize, and occasionally more rural vistas, in shades of pastel yellow-blue.

Housing estates, municipal sports facilities, karaoke parlours, railway lines, small
suburban streets, underground stations, parked cars or shopping complexes
form a drab background that doesn’t try to be anything else than what it is. By
contrast, then, the dreamy expression of these female characters add a touch of
the unexpected, bringing onto the canvas an ability to overcome one’s immediate
surroundings that constitutes one of Kuraya’s work greatest charm.
The girls’ expressions and demeanours are sweet and curious, hopeful, maybe a
bit surprised, at times just a little cheeky, or frowning slightly, easily eliciting an
aectionate smile from the viewer. The sparse objects that they hold in their
hands add to the dreamy yet insistent quality of their exterior: a little pet dog, in
one painting, a train ticket in another, a small toy cat in one more. In a note
written for her rst solo show at Kaikai Kiki Gallery, in August of 2019, Kuraya
stated that most of the girls she has drawn were “born from dark feelings and
experiences” which, however, hid a kernel of light inside them. Her paintings of
them are an attempt at “touching this darkness and light” in an attempt to
connect what she calls “the darkness inside of me” with the world outside. Less
frequently, that light alone pops out from her purely happy drawings: like the
girl with the toy taser gun, winking in the middle of splashes of colour, or the
wide-eyes girl that inhales a yellow marigold’s perfume, from what seems to be
an urban ower shop.
While her oil paintings tend to be on the large side – some being more than 2
meters high, producing yet another unexpected contrast and leaving the
viewer faced with these barely out of childhood girls that appear seemingly out
of nowhere, incarnated into larger than life beings – the drawings are often
small sketches, used both as an artistic statement onto themselves, and as
preparatory works for larger compositions. In the drawings the backgrounds are
mostly just referred to through quick lines of ink, lled in with washes of colour
to add a touch of depth to the whole, exploring the line in all its possibilities. Her
pencil is quick and emotionally charged, bursting forth to describe, as if
following an urge, a moment in time, that could be as eeting as this big-eyes
girls’ youth.
Each painting, each sketch, is a moment in time that has been captured before
it disappears, with all the unanswered questions that these enigmatic, gentle
girls seem to carry with themselves, as they move forward into their own
experiences, and into the world. 

Written by Ilaria Maria Sala