There are numerous layers of symbology, narrative and which means woven into the aesthetic Takashi Murakami famously referred to as “Superflat.” What started as an artwork model developed right into a motion, and from there, it grew right into a full-fledged ecosystem of artists now working below the KaiKai Kiki studio-enterprise. Amongst them, a distinctly female voice has quietly emerged with rising prominence lately. Aya Takano has firmly established herself on the worldwide modern artwork stage along with her spellbinding, ethereal visions. Her otherworldly tableaux are saturated with a cheerful sort of magnificence and symbolism, but subtly infused with a religious, even mystical, undercurrent. This quiet but potent pressure presents a poetic counterpoint to the dominant anthropocentric worldview. Past the flatness, there exists a palpable religious depth that gestures towards an expanded consciousness and a heightened consciousness of humanity’s place on the earth.
“I attempt to always remember the sorts of questions and emotions I had throughout adolescence—like ‘Why does the universe exist?’ or ‘Why reside issues alive?’” Takano advised Observer once we caught up along with her forward of the opening of her new present at Perrotin Los Angeles. In pursuit of these questions, she has drawn from a large constellation of disciplines—science, cultural anthropology, music, religious traditions and the uncooked materials of her personal lived expertise. But, she stays satisfied that the unconscious is much wiser and deeper than the acutely aware thoughts. “Utilizing what I’ve realized as clues, I take a journey inward. I really feel that if I am going deep sufficient, that interior world is linked to every thing else, like a collective unconscious,” she mirrored.
Whereas her work engages with the “Superflat” aesthetic of manga and anime, it’s marked by a palpable emotional urgency and a singular religious depth rooted in a dense interweaving of mythological narratives, archetypes and symbolic kinds. In spite of everything, when considered via an anthropological and semiotic lens, the aesthetic of manga and anime—with their stylized imagery embodying total psychological states and mythic constructions distilled into episodic, shortly absorbable narratives—shouldn’t be up to now faraway from the narrative mechanisms of up to date fairy tales. Each perform as symbolic techniques, distilling advanced emotional and existential questions into visible language and archetypal storytelling. Think about anime like Sailor Moon, The Zodiac Knights, Magical Circle Guru Guru, Cardcaptor Sakura, Digimon, Ojamajo Doremi, Monster Rancher and even world blockbuster like Pokémon—every, in its personal manner, seeks to teach a brand new technology towards a extra harmonious, ecologically or cosmically attuned existence, grounded in the identical archetypal roots that run via historical cross-cultural myths.
For Takano, this depth arises from an ongoing apply of attuning herself to the flux of the collective unconscious—and from a eager consciousness of her place on the crossroads of area and time. “Archetypes and myths finally maintain immense energy,” Takano famous as we mentioned the archetypal pressure she infuses into her ultra-contemporary aesthetic, quietly linking it to extra ancestral types of knowledge. In a liminal, meditative state, she permits photos to floor as visions—rising from deeper layers of consciousness and actuality, formed via an intuitive give up to that present. “Once I attain a sure meditative state, I begin to see visions—and I paint what I see,” she added. “I place a variety of significance on unconscious instinct.” Whereas she could set a common route for every work, what really seems—what she really sees—stays unknown till it reveals itself on the canvas.
There was a time when her work was pushed by anger on the state of the world. At present, Takano’s apply is more and more targeted on reawakening ecological consciousness—a significant recognition that we’re a part of an unlimited entanglement of relationships and interdependencies, connecting us to different beings and the cosmos on each bodily and religious ranges. By tapping into the collective unconscious—that ever-elusive reservoir of visible and symbolic reminiscence—she embarks on a seek for deeper which means: a return to the previous, to the roots and essence of existence, to one thing that precedes the corrupted nature of up to date human conduct. “I really feel that the unconscious exists past the boundaries of time,” she mentioned, “so I attempt to deliver again one thing from that area—timeless knowledge, consolation, a route or focus that I consider we should always take note of.”
In Takano’s newest works, there’s a clear effort to mirror on the human existential situation and our planetary place inside a broader internet of significant interdependencies and connections with different beings. Her extremely imaginative compositions perform like modern myths—via a symbolically charged visible lexicon, they rework into allegories of a speculative, extra harmonious future. In distinction to a traditionally biased, anthropocentric worldview, she embraces the fantastical and the magical to suggest various, participatory ecologies. Her purpose is to seek for and form a brand new mythology—one which can also be an ecology—guiding us towards deeper attunement with various types of kinship and serving to us envision a extra natural, interconnected and balanced world.
The tales we unconsciously develop up believing—these embedded within the very material of the societal and political techniques that form how we orient ourselves on the earth—are, Takano asserted, deeply impoverished. Take the parable of capitalism, for instance, which imposes a human-centered, exploitative worldview. “I really feel that they’re attempting to devour every thing based mostly on need,” she mentioned. “I’m looking out as an alternative for a brand new fable that’s totally different from that.” She believes that creating a strong fable—one which communicates via symbols, in a poetic and empathic register—can have a better impression than political protest or taking public workplace. “I wish to create a brand new fable that features parts of magic that really exist and are important to residing beings, but are not acknowledged inside the frameworks of symbiosis or scientific information.”
That is one thing Takano started exploring from an early age. Her earliest drawings, made at age three, have been easy circles, already hinting on the cyclical, spiral-like patterns that may later outline her visible cosmology. These kinds evoke the perpetual flux between delivery, evolution, decay and renewal—a central theme in her apply. Not by coincidence, one of many works within the present depicts two characters studying Phoenix, the legendary manga by Osamu Tezuka—a visionary story that equally traces the cyclical nature of life, dying and rebirth.
A recurring theme in Takano’s work is the celebration of generative, female energies. But, as she clarifies, these figures usually are not essentially feminine. They embrace males, animals, crops—even undifferentiated beings and hybrids that haven’t but turn out to be something particularly, however nonetheless maintain the complete potential for transformation and transmutation. “I’ve heard that, from a chromosomal perspective, males could ultimately disappear. Maybe, from a organic standpoint, the female is the unique type of all residing issues,” Takano mentioned. Though ladies have been oppressed all through historical past and throughout cultures, she believes the female—robust, free and versatile—is essentially the most important and resilient pressure in life.
Her works, although enigmatic of their symbolism, radiate a deep sense of pleasure and playfulness—qualities they share with the very nature of unfiltered creativeness. Her characters are luminous, enlivened, emanating important vitality as they harmoniously join with their environment and different beings, past any decoded linguistic or rational system. In a couple of work, there’s the suggestion of religious illumination—a sudden flame of consciousness that hyperlinks interior consciousness and soul with one thing better: the universe itself. “Inside our our bodies is embedded all the historical past of life,” Takano mentioned. “Our DNA holds the knowledge and reminiscences from the time we have been crops, reptiles or fish. If we are able to entry this, we might be able to journey all the way in which again to a spot that feels just like the very supply of life.”
Embarking on a journey into the depths of the universally shared unconscious—the place time, reminiscence and nature entwine—Takano faucets right into a primordial dimension extra attuned to the radiance of all cosmic life. Within the spirit of Carl Jung’s notion of an archive of the collective unconscious and Michael Meade’s mythopoetic creativeness, her work turns into a threshold between interior and outer worlds, the place private imaginative and prescient merges with ancestral fable and the mythic speaks via the self. “how deep how far we are able to go?”—the title of 1 exhibition—feels much less like a query than a portal, because the exhibition transforms right into a ritual website and an invite to reconnect with nature, fable and the forgotten intelligence of the soul.
As Takano’s fantastical figures drift via otherworldly terrains and liminal dreamscapes, they finally recommend that the true capacities of thoughts and spirit can lengthen far past the boundaries of the bodily physique. As soon as we attune to this energetic frequency and the archetypal reminiscence of the cosmos inside, we achieve entry to an imaginative consciousness that pulls us nearer to essence itself.
Aya Takano’s “how deep how far we are able to go?” is on view at Perrotin Los Angeles via August 29, 2025.
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