Naoko Majima "In the Dense Forest"（TOKYO）

Majima was born in Aichi prefecture, 1944. From early 1980s, she continues to bring out ghastly and frightening, yet beautiful pencil drawings and objet d’art with her own unique style. In 2006, she had two grand-scale solo exhibitions; one was at Aomori Contemporary Art Centre and the other was at Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art. This summer she participated in a memorable first exhibition titled “Reality of nine contemporary artists” at Yokosuka Museum of Art. She is one of the most flourishing contemporary artists. 

In this exhibition, “In the Dense Forest,” Majima brings out a pencil drawing and objet d’art that are sublimated more of her way of looking at the world. The dense forest with primitive wildness is a mystery zone where humans cannot intrude. In that untrodden field, Majima draws image of living creatures, that are far richer than the real world we live in, and she pursues the mother of life.

After the exhibition at Yokosuka Museum of Art, Majima attempts to create humanoid objet d’art. Her objet d’art has been changed from symbolic ones to spiritual ones with more of vividness. Her new work is made with colorful clothes and threads, and sometimes with common materials in her daily life. It has astonishingly huge head, its eyes are protrudent, and its tongue (or nose) is long as if it is a snake. It looks bizarre and off-balance. 

This new humanoid objet d’art was bore as a result of intertangle of Majima’s unutterable multidirectional distrust towards this contemporary world and her imagination of creature that lives in the untrodden field. 

The dense forest is destroyed and is about to lose, however, it used to have flowing of condensed time, and gave lot of imagination to mankind with its whelming presence. Majima says that “Even the dense forest was destroyed by modern people, I would like to rediscover the vital energy in the untrodden field. Creating artworks is a labor that pragmatizing a phantasma.” For Majima, dense forest is a cavern that infiltrate deep inside of herself. At the same time, it is an important place to get to the human’s oldest memory that remains in our (Majima’s) gene.

Life and death, Majima’s works scoop out mankind’s inner face. They are vividly true to life, therefore, they are pure. We would like every one of you to see that Majima’s artworks.