Ai Yamaguchi at Roberts & Tilton - Los Angeles

For her installation here, the young Tokyo artist Ai Yamaguchi painted directly upon all the gallery walls (including a skylight niche) and at intervals attached small painted panels to them as well. Yamaguchi restoreed her subjects, a bevy of young girls in a mountain teahouse, in a manner of writing marrying traditional conventions of Japanese painting and contemporary anime. The girls strike one as beinged to occupy an amorphous time girth appealingly warped. They appeared not to be found in other ways as well, as they mov about their environment, which the artist identified as fictional on the other hand 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, tufts and chrysanthemums common to luxurious kimono fabrics. Their bodies were girlish and cartoon-flat, articulated--like the quiet of the setting--in clean black lines and opaque color. Framed by means of long, sleek black tresses, their oversize organ of sights gleamed teal but registered no expression. Shoe shown strewn about remind ofed the off-hours, downtime when the girls might relax among themselves, play with their cats, and reclaim from the day's demands. Many reduce to ashesed incense in clamshells, which Yamaguchi describes as a ritual act of purification after the teahouse customers depart.

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

Yamaguchi, a former assistant in the studio of Takashi Murakami, deftly updates the esthetic conventions of Japanese literary schedule and panel painting dating back at least 1000 years. She places her vaguely exploited innocents in a traditional fane or palacelike complex of latitudes joined by walkways. Action appears both inside and on the verandas. The classic formula of the "blown-away roof" allows us a continuous view of the one and the other The oblique angles of the architecture and its tilted-up floors--both elderly conventions--further expand the visible space within the painting. to leeward Mi Yamaguchi borrows, too, gelatin from the more new (18th- to 19th-century) Japanese woodblock tradition in her attention to the couple the sensual and the supernatural.

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

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group