Little Trouble Girl Little Trouble Girl

A little girl, flashlight in her hand, is walking along, searching for something in the dark. Around her are symbols that are scattered around the city: pro baseball teams, auto companies, marks found in childhood memories. The girl wandering in the city, responding to those images, can be understood to be the artist herself. The style of soaking watercolors into paper is one of the major continuous lines in Mori Chihiro’s extremely varied work. This technique, which owes much to the study of Nihonga, is, according to the artist, appropriated for expressing “the moist feeling of the city” and the “human tactile sense” of living there. Mori Chihiro, who was born in 1978, has garnered considerable interest from early in her career for remixing groups of the images that inundate urban life-the symbols, movies, manga, advertisements-and the objects used in everyday life, or disposed of, in paintings and three-dimensional works that transform the environment that surrounds her from her unique perspective. These works, which express a fascination with the “Showa image” from the era in which she grew up, both stir up collective memories and go on to speak of the autochthonous drives, seen in folk tales and references to Buddhas and deities, latent deep within them.