Current Location

A solo exhibition of new paintings by Hikari Shimoda, known for her colorful and illustrative portraits of starry-eyed children, who personify modern day issues and the artist’s own emotions.

MEGUMI OGITA GALLERY is pleased to present Hikari Shimoda’s solo exhibition “Current Location”. Her work imagines a world in which cuteness and horror, loneliness, life and death all coexist. Since 2011, she has also exhibited her work abroad, with her first solo exhibition at Corey Helford Gallery, Los Angeles, California, in July 2014, and a solo exhibition at Asahi Art Museum in her home prefecture of Nagano, Japan, in 2018. She exhibited for the first time at MEGUMI OGITA GALLERY, Tokyo, in the group exhibition “Portraits” in 2021.

Shimoda’s work presents the concept of children as ambiguous vessels of her own expression, as human beings who are not restricted by gender or attributes. In order to intuitively convey the idea of her work to people around the world, she adopted the manga and anime style that influenced her. From around 2010-2011, she began to paint motifs such as superheroes and magical girls and established a series of techniques with newspaper collages and brush strokes to question social issues and religious views. The artist’s personal anxiety and loneliness is also a universal theme and it is important that the children she portrays are both “everyone and no one”. For this reason, her work depicts illustrated characters rather than someone specific. The colorful and appealing background of the work draws in the viewer, only to reveal the danger and chaos of the world that could reverse at any moment. These isolated motifs can be positive elements but can also be converted into powerful images in aggregate or in certain color combinations. The seemingly expressionless children are “cups of emotions” into which Shimoda can pour her own thoughts. Their large eyes gaze into space, reflecting light and darkness, while their horns are a metaphor for emotions such as anger and despair at the unreasonable world. Shimoda aims to show that humans have a variety of emotions and multiple facets, which are expressed by changing the way of painting the left and right eyes, and by avoiding eye contact, thereby complicating the impression that the viewer receives. In an uncertain age of accelerating division and chaos, Shimoda’s work reminds us that each individual has his or her own story, and that this story has great significance, regardless of how others evaluate it. The new works, painted for this exhibition show Shimoda’s unwavering determination for the path she is taking towards hope and enlightenment.

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