Marina Kawabe
@mazukibe
Heavily informed by her heritage, Marina Kawabe’s current practice dissects the Japanese female experience through decorative ceramic forms, appropriating contemporary motifs and aesthetics. Her work is concerned with the Japanese postwar aesthetic, and its subsequent effect on the country’s internal and external cultural image. Kawabe’s hand-built ceramic sculptures stylistically engage with the anime style, translating flat cartoon imagery into three-dimensional forms. Placing the large eyed childlike figures in suggestive, often fetishistic contexts, Kawabe prompts viewers to reassess the normalisation of such imagery in Japanese popular culture. This criticism of predatory depictions of young women forms the foundation of Kawabe’s practice, alongside the fetishisation of East Asian aesthetics as a result of globalisation and contemporary Orientalism. In creating her works, Kawabe aims to nurture the exploited female figure, a process that is facilitated by the clay medium.
View the work: Building 24 Ground Floor, Rayner Hoff Project Space
