Samehoshi Japanese, b. 1997
Flowers filling the screen are intermingled with animated characters. A girl is depicted on the other side of the transparent flowers with a vague, sometimes sad, sometimes troubled expression on her face.
Lovers of contemporary American art will recognize that the flowers are a reference to Georgia O'Keeffe's famous series of flowers. Since flowers have been described as sexual organs for plants and trees because pollination takes place in the stamen inside the petals, O'Keeffe's flower series has also been subjected to the stereotypical interpretation of "flowers = sexual organs," and even feminists have understood it as a metaphor for sexual organs, while also drawing on Freud's psychoanalytic theory.
Given the background of O'Keeffe's floral works and her words quoted in the title, this work, in which the character of a young girl is superimposed, expresses the feelings of O'Keeffe, whose works were unwillingly interpreted in a sexual manner by her husband Alfred Stieglitz and others, and is interpreted as an attempt to scoop them up from the sea of abstract history. It can be interpreted as an attempt to scoop up O'Keeffe from the sea of abstracted history.
In addition, the choice of an anime girl character, whose theme is solidarity with other women, as a motif is a reflection of the "superflat" male-centeredness of Japanese subculture, which was advocated by Takashi Murakami, a Japanese contemporary artist, and has been regarded as a representative of Japan by the West since the 2000s. This is a critical deconstruction from a feminist perspective of the distorted image of women constructed unilaterally from the male perspective that Japanese subcultures have held since the 2000s, and which has become a representative of Japan from the West.