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Arisa Ihashi
Visual Print Artist

Studied fashion and textile design at the University of the Arts London and returned to Japan in 2017.

I am drawn to two visual languages that share a single quality: they do not exist in nature. The first is the artificial colour of toys and confections — saturated, synthetic, and immediate. The second is the flawless symmetry found in devotional painting — ordered, elevated, and still. I layer these two seemingly incompatible registers in my work because together they generate a tension that purely natural imagery cannot: the feeling of standing at the threshold between what is real and what is imagined.

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Jules Verne wrote that anything a person can imagine, a person can ultimately realise. I return to this proposition often — not as an optimistic promise, but as a description of how imagination operates on reality. Fiction is not the opposite of the real; it is a proposal made to the real. My practice is built around that proposal: taking the ordinary textures and forms of daily life and reconstructing them into configurations that could not exist outside of thought. In doing so, I aim to offer the viewer not an escape from reality, but a new angle from which to value it.

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Recent works develop the theme of "an unreality generated from the everyday." Motifs drawn from familiar life are abstracted into perfect symmetry and drenched in vivid, impossible colour — a visual language intended to act directly on the senses before the intellect intervenes. Underlying this is a concept from Japanese cultural tradition: that a mirror does not merely reflect the world but opens onto another one. I use this idea as a structural principle, weaving together the cultural and the quotidian to produce environments that feel simultaneously recognisable and wholly elsewhere.

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I regard the full arc from making to viewing as a single process. When a viewer stands before the work, their own knowledge, sensibility, and experience enter into dialogue with it — and the answers they arrive at will be entirely their own. I do not resolve the work. I believe that encountering an answer different from our own, and allowing it to be equally valid, is one of the most direct routes to a wider life. My practice is, in this sense, not only about image-making but about the conditions under which people meet each other through images.

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