Sketched out in pencil, then painted in acrylic on fine cotton cloth, Tomoko Kashiki’s paintings are mounted on wooden boards with bevelled edges that create a subtle separation from the walls on which they are hung. On first glance, the paintings bear a strong resemblance to nihonga (traditional Japanese painting), in which Kashiki was trained. Her surfaces, however, are created by layering the non-traditional material of acrylic paint, which is applied to the canvas, sanded back and repainted, with the process repeated again and again. This technique — and Kashiki’s fine and ghostly painterly style — evokes a range of historical and contemporary references: Heian Buddhist painting, the delicate nihonga of Seihou Takeuchi, the iconic bijinga (images of beautiful women) of Shoen Uemura, and the early canvases of Takashi Murakami.

The women in Kashiki’s paintings, typically depicted in domestic environments or engaged in activities like eating or bathing, are almost always artfully distorted. Shifting between the ethereal and the substantive, some sections of their bodies fade into the background while others sit above it; in the depiction of some, the precise nexus of layers is ambiguous. Their elongated limbs curve in graceful yet uncanny arcs, conforming less to the logic of anatomy than the stylistic requirements of the artist’s works. Emblematic of Kashiki’s distinctive style and rendering, Eating grass 2011 situates its female protagonist at the front of an exotic ground that extends back into darkness. The figure, with chopsticks poised delicately above a plate of grass, appears elegantly malformed, the structure of her body echoing the pattern of her dress, which itself bears an odd, reflective relationship to the eerily beautiful landscape.

I am a rock 2012, meanwhile, depicts a young woman slumped over an upturned cardboard box. Typical of the artist’s ethereal, oneiric scenarios, the central figure stretches languidly according to the painting’s fluid compositional logic, while parts of her body and clothes fade into the background. These flowing, organic lines contrast strikingly with the solid geometry of the box and the barcode stamped on it, while the surrounding floor appears to be a raging torrent. The contrast is repeated as layers of wood grain are curtailed by the straight edges of the walls and rafters framing the picture. The dark green hues of a leaf motif on the carpet wash into one corner of the room like a bloom of algae, while a fragile, brightly coloured paper chain dangles from the ceiling, adding an affectingly hopeful cheer to the melancholy scene below.

As curator David Elliott has noted, Kashiki rarely questions why she paints women.¹ Rather, she credits an idea of beauty that she allows to remain fluid throughout the process of painting, a ‘fragile conviction’, both seductive and uncanny.² ‘Fluid’ is also an appropriate way to describe the unstable spatial relationships of dreams evoked by the paintings, as if all objects are in a permanent state of flux, liable to transform or bleed into each other at any given moment. By rendering this sensibility with the eminently plastic, manipulative medium of paint, Tomoko Kashiki ascribes a certain power to the process of representation, as if the flattening of the pictorial plane requires a new, harmonic integrity of the female body and the topographies surrounding it, even at the expense of anatomy.

Endnotes

1. David Elliott, ‘Tomoko Kashiki and the floating world’, in Tomoko Kashiki [exhibition catalogue], Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, 2014, p.6.
2. ‘Artist Tomoko Kashiki on how she paints’, Observer [London], Sunday 20 September 2009, viewed 7 April 2014.