Alice Shintani‘s studio is fascinating: In the neighbourhood of Bela Vista in São Paulo, she has transformed an old shop into her home and studio. I enter through lowered roller shutters used to close a shop front at night time. The space with high ceilings is divided into working zone and living area but the division is a rather smooth transition: Alice‘s bed is floating above her library and working area, a construction she made herself and which she painted in the way that is typical for her art. Alice even has a small backyard that she uses as garden.
The granddaughter of Japanese immigrants was one of the first people in Brazil working with internet and developing it during the late 1980s. She tells me that when the bubble crashed and capitalism entered the formerly ideological area of the net, she decided to dedicate herself to art. Coming from a background between Japanese tradition and Brazilian life, having an IT education and working with art, Alice Shintani can be described as hybrid in many senses. And she explains that she likes to be in-between places.
Alice uses industrial-looking paint whose shades she herself blends. In the work series “Bakemono“ (2010), which is named after the preternatural creatures from Japanese mythology, the large and organic seeming forms are applied with a brush but evoke a feeling of mechanical manufacturing. They seem too perfect and smooth for having been painted by human hand. Like an algorithmic or computer game based background, they look as if their shapes were floating around and could rearrange themselves at any moment. Alice explains that she is interested in the pastel colours she uses because they are an in-between of photoshop material and physical substance.
For her project “Quimera“ (Chimaera or Phantasm - 2007), Alice transformed the entire rooms of Galeria Virgílio in São Paulo into a space in-between. The shapes and colours of her paintings were applied to the gallery walls, floor, and ceiling. The visitors found themselves in an intense experience for their senses but also in a non-defined place: an empty gallery space in which one would usually expect art objects and at the same time an expansive and room-filling situation. Alluding to the environments of the 1960s, the spectator found herself in a space that brings virtual experiences from a computer-based world back into physical space. Mediated experience becomes direct.
In this sense, Alice‘s work shows reference to the work by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. His “superflat“ art can be seen as pointer to the mediated world we live in and consumerism that evolved in Japan after World War II. This development is seen as response to the Americanisation of Japanese culture and the difficulties the country faced in finding an own post-war identity. Combining so-called high culture or traditional painting with entertainment and subcultures is one of the main features of superflat, which derives its inspiration from the Otaku subculture, manga, and anime. It reminds me of the perfect surfaces of Alice‘s paintings and of how she described her own situation: her Japanese descent and life in Brazil and her eduction in computer science but working with art. This in-between status of Japanese post-war culture and the superflat movement can be traced in Alice‘s work: Between virtually simulated forms and their coming into being physically on canvas or in spaces.
Alice Shintani wants to create situations and transform her paintings into an overall experience despite their flat surface. She is looking for places beyond the familiar, remodelling our perception by crossing borders and merging disconnected things in a similar she did when constructing her home and studio.
Harum Marcio
Biography
Janaína Navarro
Felicitas Rohden
Vinicius Spricigo
Beto Shwafaty
Stefanie Hessler
