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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.

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.

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.

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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