A panoramic, dreamlike digital illustration depicts a vibrant yet unsettling landscape. On the left, a lush green forest with a dark river flows, transitioning to a central, pale-skinned, androgynous figure with wild, colorful hair, bared teeth, and wide, red eyes. To the right, the scene shifts to a chaotic graveyard with intricate tombstones and a winding, overgrown road, where a small figure sits observing the scene.

Verdant Islands: Nature and the Supernatural in Japanese Prints and the Art of Aoshima Chiho

Fay Boyer Preble and Virginia Cooke Murphy Wing

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AOSHIMA Chiho 青島千穂 (born 1974). Japanese; Heisei period, 2004. Sublime Grave Dweller Shinko. Chromogenic print, Edition 1/6, 30 x 118 ⅛ inches. Loan from John L. Bloch, L2012:93.1

This exhibition juxtaposes contemporary works by Aoshima Chiho with a variety of Japanese prints from the 19th-21st centuries to reveal common threads in imagery and design. Aoshima’s fertile imagination spawns disturbing and yet cute, brightly colored visions that she designs using computer software and produces at monumental scale. Informed by traditional Buddhist hell scrolls, ghost pictures, ukiyo-e prints, manga, and anime, she populates her creations with frightening apparitions and winsome female sprites, conveying tensions between humans and the natural world. Many of her motifs echo earlier subject matter such as landscapes, tsunami, and flames, and also Japan’s rich trove of eerie stories. The two featured works by Aoshima are generous loans from John L. Bloch, and many of the Japanese prints are recent gifts or loans from the distinguished collections of Lee & Mary Jean Michels, Irwin Lavenberg, and Peter DeFazio.

This exhibition also includes examples of painting, sculpture, textiles, and decorative art from the museum’s permanent collection, along with recent works by Murakami Takashi and other modern and contemporary artists, playful examples of privately printed votive slips (senjafuda or nōsatsu) depicting Japanese monsters (yōkai), and a selection of exquisite katagami textile stencils and tools from an important collection recently donated by Susanna Campbell Kuo.

Verdant Islands was organized by chief curator Anne Rose Kitagawa in collaboration with professors Akiko Walley and Glynne Walley to support their 2025-2026 courses in Art History and East Asian Languages and Literatures.