Japanese artist Yumiko Kayukawa has lived and worked in the United States for the past six years. Since then, she says she has grown much more interested in her home country. Her images connect the traditional Japanese form of manga with the specific feeling of a younger generation that learned to express itself through an array of media. Originally, manga was an informal form of representation, a narrative snapshot – not a comic strip. The concept was made popular over 200 years ago by the most famous of Japanese artists, Ukiyo-e-Meister Katsushika Hokusai. Yumiko Kayukawa captures this traditional form, translates it for contemporary society, and infuses it with individual elements and selected subjects. Animals, both wild and tame, always have a place in her iconic vocabulary. In the context of her pieces, nature, people, and animals are inseparable. The scenes in her images feel like a reworked Japanese version of Alice in Wonderland, whereby the supposed childlike naivety is always broken. A girl with tattooed arms, swinging a samurai sword in “Nihon Ookami” strongly recollects the famous films she’s modeled after. The drawings of pop culture and cultural history act as eventful ingredients in the innovative visual language of her images. The young girl in Kayukawa’s pictures is transmutable; she always slips into new roles and takes on new situations. Yumiko Kayukawa illustrates the feeling of an entire generation that is searching for itself, always in tension with the old and the new.

Stephan Reisner