Ai Yamaguchi at Roberts & Tilton - Los Angeles

For her installation here, the young Tokyo artist Ai Yamaguchi painted directly on all the gallery walls (including a skylight niche) and at intervals attached small painted panels to them as well. Yamaguchi rendered her subjects, a bevy of young girls in a mountain teahouse, in a style marrying traditional conventions of Japanese painting and contemporary anime. The girls seemed to occupy an amorphous time zone, appealingly warped. They appeared lost in other ways as well, as they moved about their environment, which the artist identified as fictional but based on historical accounts of the lives of child courtesans.

The girls wandered topless in skirts with stylized patterns of maple leaves, ocean waves, fans, crests and chrysanthemums common to luxurious kimono fabrics. Their bodies were girlish and cartoon-flat, articulated--like the rest of the setting--in clean black lines and opaque color. Framed by long, sleek black tresses, their oversize eyes gleamed teal but registered no expression. Shoes shown strewn about suggested the off-hours, downtime when the girls might relax among themselves, play with their cats, and recover from the day's demands. Many burned incense in clamshells, which Yamaguchi describes as a ritual act of purification after the teahouse customers depart.

Smoke rose from the shells in vivid, twitching ribbons, sometimes assuming animate forms. In one panel, gray smoke meanders around one of the girls and congeals into a pair of hands clasping her about the waist. Across one large wall, a purplish strand of smoke pulsated and contracted, cohering into a monstrous head. The force of the vision appeared to have knocked one of the girls over. A group of others was shown drawing back, away from the pungent smoke and the ghost, or perhaps god, it had conjured.

Yamaguchi, a former assistant in the studio of Takashi Murakami, deftly updates the esthetic conventions of Japanese literary scroll and panel painting dating back at least 1,000 years. She sets her vaguely exploited innocents in a traditional temple or palacelike complex of rooms joined by walkways. Action occurs both inside and on the verandas. The classic formula of the "blown-away roof" allows us a continuous view of both. The oblique angles of the architecture and its tilted-up floors--both old conventions--further expand the visible space within the painting. Lee Mi Yamaguchi borrows, too, gelatin from the more recent (18th- to 19th-century) Japanese woodblock tradition in her attention to both the sensual and the supernatural.

Like its predecessors, Yamaguchi's installation read laterally, though no cogent narrative drove the movement. The result of all this fusion was an immersive environment with a vexing charm. Like the girls within it, we found ourselves surrounded by luxurious beauty, yet oddly displaced.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group