Predictive Dreams: The Sculptures of Katsuyo Ayoki
There was a time when people knew how to decorate. Really decorate. I’m not talking about the silly little stencils on your coffee mug or the half-assed scrollwork around your mom’s bookshelves. No, I mean intense, rococo decoration. Ornamentation so expansive, so dripping and vulgar that the very tectonic structure of the object being decorated is gone, that there are no more right angles in the square. Decoration so gaudy, so superficial and over the top that people accused the decorator of sacrilege and profanity.
That’s the kind of ornamentation sculptor Katsuyo Aoki concerns herself with. But where many have looked intothis kind of ornamental art and seen no depth, she sees only volumes of cultural significance and an undeniable metaphysic, as if by revealing the lavish excesses of human fancy and flesh one can’t help but acknowledge the spirit underneath. She uses porcelain for her medium. An appropriate choice.
Only porcelain combines historic notions of delicacy and luxury with more contemporary associations of tackiness and cheapness. It is a symbol both of divine purity and kitsch gaudiness, and these kinds of contradictions are all over Aoki’s work.
She said she considers the contemporary world to be complex and varied with several opposing and contradictory imperatives. Thus, she’s most inspired by periods in art history that represent times of existential transition and upheaval in the art world (not to mention ones of significant flourish): the baroque and rococo, the gothic, and the expressionist niche of the postmodern.
“There are some similarities between our age and their age. The instability comes from feeling disoriented in a paradoxical state. Thus, the reoccurring theme of mortality turns out to be meaningful,” she says.
This theme of mortality appears most notably in her newest body of work, the Predictive Dream pieces. A series of expertly wrought, meticulously detailed and excessively decorated skull forms, the Predictive Dream sculptures represent a conceptual crux for Aoki’s style.
There’s the vulgarity of her rococo-esque ornamentation, but it’s conceptually tempered and enlightened by the profundity of the skull form.
“to define that as frivolous, vulgar and superficial is itself a superficial understanding of art representing the present age.”
As for myself,” Aoki explaned, “classical styles, as well as craftsmanship, are rather fresh and fascinating. Intuitively, I perceive they contain the elements to well express the present age.”
She noted that the skull’s historical consequence as a symbol of mortality and the gate to the spiritual realm has eroded in favor of being a fashion symbol and a post-pop accessory. But the adoration she imposes on the familiar form serves to exalt it from the recesses of popular culture and almost reposition the skull as a spiritual icon.
The tension then between the contemporary and the historical meanings of the skull symbol becomes another layer in Aoki’s take on today’s culture. The contradictory and ironic age in which she’s found herself often grotesquely juxtaposes the cheap and the sacred and sometimes, as with the skull, even manifests these antipodes in the same object.
This line of thinking adds to similar discussions initiated by contemporary-art heavyweights Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. Their sculptures primed our sensibilities for Aoki’s ornamental excesses, excesses that penetrate so deeply into the realm of superfi ciality that life seems grotesquely meaningful by comparison.
The decorativeness quoted from other ornamental art in my works are not for challenging; it is for my own expression as a fine artist.”
But compared to Hirst and Koons, Katsuyo’s work seems a little anachronistic, a little awkward in a generation accustomed to justifying every fl ourish, embellishment and technical sympathy to the enforcers of minimalism and deconstructionism. And one of the main differences between her ornamentation and Hirst’s diamondencrusted skulls and Koons’ porcelain Michael Jackson is her altruism, the very lack of cynicism and self-reference that made the aforementioned works so iconic.
In her artist’s statement, she concedes that her style and those ornamental traditions she’s drawing from evoke a sense of languor but also“ make us feel tranquility and a we that can almost be described as religious.”
Though her work seems to teeter on the edge of commenting on the very ornamentalism it employs, Aoki doesn’t really buy into the art-about-art narrative. She seems too wonder-struck by the potential of her medium and the richness of art history to be as jaded as that.
For instance, when I pointed out that some of the styles she was referencing—rococo in particular—are criticized as frivolous, trite and soulless, even as she employs it to evoke a sense of spirituality, she commented, “In my opinion, to define that as frivolous, vulgar and superficial is itself a superficial understanding of art representing the present age.”
Complimenting her altruism is her technique. She uses several methods of manipulating the porcelain, a notoriously unforgiving material. By throwing, trimming, building, casting and slip trailing, she eventually pulls out an object that could only have arisen from an expert’s understanding of the process.
When I asked why she is determined to challenge the lines between fine art, decorative art and craft, she responded, “Actually, I wonder why there are still some people bent on those lines, and I do not understand the point
of differentiating between them. The decorativeness quoted from other ornamental art in my works are not for challenging; it is for my own expression as a fine artist.”
She could not make the art she does without this kind of sentimentality. It is not easy for cynicism to craft a thing this beautifully. Only by a passion for what she’s doing and a belief in its rightness could someone invest the level of care it takes to render sculptures this intense.
In Aoki, there is a return to old, less abstracted modes of thinking where craftsmanship was a given and there wasn’t such an over-thought line between the physical and spiritual. Her work suggests that it’s time the art world shed its cynicism and its distaste for idealism and metaphysics and applied some classic notions to our updated, ironic and uncertain viewpoint.
“As for myself,” Aoki explaned, “classical styles, as well as craftsmanship, are rather fresh and fascinating. Intuitively, I perceive they contain the elements to well express the present age.” *
This article first appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 21, which is sold out. Subscribe to Hi-Fructose today and get our latest issue as part of your subscription.
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