Art Brief: Asae Soya

Perspective, by its invocation of distance, divides things and people from each other. While such divisions help us to organize things on a mental and visual level, it can also deaden the sensuousness and warmth we feel for those things around us. This has always been the main drawback of the Western artistic tradition.

33-year-old Asae Soya, who recently earned a doctorate in art from the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music, paints in a style that uses elements of Western perspective, but seeks to overcome its drawbacks by, as she says, “employing the five senses to the full.”

In her first solo exhibition since 2003, she pursues this agenda in the 15 paintings and 10 drawing on show (two thirds sold on the first day) by employing a number of distorting factors that visually simulate at least two of the other four senses. Shimmering, rainbow-refracted colors and watery effects painted in oil on panel-mounted cotton give her works a warmth and wetness that you can almost feel, while her ripples seem to emit the sounds of water drops dropping.

Many of her works have hitherto focused on impressions from the bathroom, but the present exhibition reveals a growing ambition with a number of works based on airports. Here the motifs of water are used to bring distance closer and to make the impersonal intimate. The water droplets and the blurred lights of “Airport Eastgate” (2007) turn the soulless environment of these portals of distance into something resembling an inner psychic soulscape.

Japan Times
November 1, 2007