KIMURA Ryōko - Department of Art and Art History: University of Hawaii at Manoa

EXHIBITION

On view as a part of IMAYŌ: JAPAN’S NEW TRADITIONISTS at

The Art Gallery at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
October 2 – December 2, 2016
&
Honolulu Museum of Art
October 13, 2016 – January 8, 2017

Thursday, October 20 / John Young Museum of Art
3:00–4:30 p.m. Artist talk by painter KIMURA Ryōko
free and open to the public

KIMURA Ryōko

KIMURA Ryōko is a painter with wide-ranging knowledge and interest in Japan’s pictorial heritage, including Chinese-style landscapes, Zen Buddhist ink portraiture, and Ukiyo-e paintings and woodblock prints. At the same time, her works are unmistakably contemporary due to Kimura’s subject matter of choice, namely beautiful males, especially the movie idol and pop singer types commonly reproduced in Japanese teen girl magazines. Her work recalls the Edo-period Ukiyo-e pictorial tradition, with its obsessive focus on beautiful female entertainers, courtesans, and other paragons of womanly beauty, which she substitutes with images of beautiful young males placed in fantastic settings. Kimura also inserts humor into her work, rendering her male subjects in a cartoonish manga-style, and placing them in exaggerated poses, allowing her paintings to fluctuate between the erotic and the comic.