Art blogger and journalist Carolina Miranda once posed the rhetorical question, “If my vagina could appreciate art, what would it want to see?” Perhaps it was the art of Ayakoh Furukawa, who will be showing her work in an exhibition beginning January 11 at Resobox in Long Island City.
In 2005, Furukawa, who was classically trained in calligraphy, stopped painting in lines and began using words or sentences. “The sentence comes first, Furukawa told us. “Then I develop the images based on the sentence.”
Deeply inspired by the universality of motherhood, but also by the sense of loss for not becoming a mother, Furukawa began looking at the vagina as a portal to the world.
Inside our mothers’ womb, we are protected as a singular newborn life. However, once we enter into the world, we are inevitably faced with the irrationalities of the world, and thus forget the original connection with our mothers. In other words, within the realm of the mother’s womb, we cannot be separated from our mothers.
But men – don’t feel left out. “My work is actually for men and for everybody,” Furukawa explained. “I want people to remember we all became a full human in our mother’s body.”
