City Glow, Mountain Whisper by Chiho Aoshima for Gloucester Road Underground station was the artist’s first solo project in the UK.
Chiho Aoshima uses digital media to create unique and extraordinary worlds full of invented creatures in imaginary landscapes. The style of Japanese scroll paintings is evident in Aoshima’s work but the result is very different from that created by traditional painting techniques. She uses computer technology to create detailed and complex images of fantasy worlds. Here, the conventions of perspective and gravity give way to artificial environments that border on the psychedelic.
“My work feels like strands of my thoughts that have flown around the universe before coming back to materialise.”
Each of the arches on the District and Circle line platform at Gloucester Road station contained a part of an elaborate composition that expands along the platform. a beautiful landscape that gradually transforms from day to night and from an urban to a rural scene, echoing the journeys of LU passengers. The vibrant colours and details keep the viewer’s gaze in constant motion.
Chiho Aoshima City Glow, Mountain Whisper shows a timeless world created by contemporary technology. It suggests a utopian vision of the earth in which the past and future have collided and the boundaries between organic creatures and inanimate things have broken down. It alludes to the results of genetic, technological and environmental developments. A hybrid of the human, the animal, the plant and the man-made is proposed, and life is literally breathed into each building and mountain.
Chiho Aoshima City Glow, Mountain Whisper 2006
Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin
Paris/Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
copyright 2006 Chiho Aoshima/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
All Rights Reserved
