Omens of Life and Death

Two girls are leaning against a large tree, an intravenous drip in their arms. They are passing anxious days, threatened by a looming death. In Japan, Web sites seeking suicide mates are spreading; boys and girls with the mutual wish to kill themselves are prevalent, and increasing. Consequently, this has become a social problem. Ai Shinohara’s works make us feel a longing for death; the look of her subjects communicates a shunning of contact with the outside world.

Yuzo Ueda  

Ai Shinohara, Think Back on Womb, 2007. Oil, cotton on panel, 91 x 72.7 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Q, Tokyo.

Two girls are leaning against a large tree, an intravenous drip in their arms. They are passing anxious days, threatened by a looming death. In Japan, Web sites seeking suicide mates are spreading; boys and girls with the mutual wish to kill themselves are prevalent, and increasing. Consequently, this has become a social problem. Ai Shinohara’s works make us feel a longing for death; the look of her subjects communicates a shunning of contact with the outside world. The works depict an uneasy and sweet world in which we are losing ourselves or becoming pilgrims in present-day life. The eyes of the girls’ drift, but the tones in the canvases—canvases upon which stuffed toys, cigarettes, cell-phones and sweets appear scattered—are bright.

Shinohara’s technique of oil painting is decorative, and her subjects are rendered in minute detail, as in the works of such Flemish painters as Jan van Eyck and Pieter Bruegel. The girls’ drifty eyes, as if seeking light or imploring something, look deeply pained. The girls also seem to be resting, mysteriously, amid an uncontrollable emotion, something akin to a torn mind and self-love. In one painting, plants shoot out roots into a girl’s body, and her blood circulates from the roots into the earth. Goldfishes become part of the girl’s body to serve as a metaphor for blood, (or life), while conveying the evanescence of life.

Oriental philosophy interprets death as reincarnation, believing that death does not signify an unfortunate end but represents a beginning. According to such an interpretation, plants and goldfishes represent nature. Death is also part of nature and, by accepting death, one is saved from the agony of this life.