Bronze Sculpture for Sale
Japan
•
1986
Kumikaho Oshima hijacks Barbie and the dollar into Neo-Pop icons: her paintings and illuminated boxes turn desire into ‘brand critique,’ exposing value, power, and the body in the consumer age
Nationality
Biography
Kumikaho Oshima is a Japanese artist born in 1986 in Tokyo.
All of her work revolves around two main topics; Barbie dolls and American dollars. She seeks to illustrate the actual condition of young women in Japan through her satirical work by criticizing the excessive implantation of Western tendencies in Japanese culture and art as well as the appropriation of capitalist symbols and values. The artist evokes the revolution of Japanese women's manners and desires in her paintings, who in a traditional and limited society began to perceive money as a source of power. Barbie dolls represent the Western physical ideal and the dollar bills play the role of an essential good to female emancipation.
From an aesthetic point of view, her work belongs to the Japanese Neo-pop art movement represented by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Oshima work is subtle, she limits the use of colors, she prefers to use earthyand fresh tonalities, which can sometimes give an impression of whashed out to her work but this impression is compensated by the sensual and emotional scenes that she depicts. She uses certain photographic techniques such as zooming or not placing the subject in the center of the frame without making the scenes more dramatic or dynamic.
With time, Kumikaho Oshima has developed a strong and easily recognizable style. Her work is present at the Jacob Paullet Gallery.
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Street Art
Pictorial Genre
Asian Art
Kawaii
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