When I am playing with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me?

—Michel de Montaigne

A pat of butter slowly melts on a piece of hot toast. As its cool, congealed oils are returned to liquid, it seeps into the welcoming, porous surface of the bread. One can hear the scraping of the butter knife and smell the aroma of this almost alchemical interaction between elements, anticipating the taste and sensation offered by the first bite. This ordinary scene is repeated daily in kitchens around the world. Its simplicity and ritualistic nature has made buttered toast important to Ulala Imai, who has made it her subject over and over again. In her hands, it serves both as a portrait of the microcosmic universe of our domestic lives and as a stand-in for the tactile art of using oil paints. Although Imai’s work is clearly inspired by the long historical tail of the still-life genre in Western oil painting, there is something definitively different about her works—whether she’s painting images of toast or of oysters, fruit, or stuffed animals. Looking at the entirety of her body of paintings from the past few years, it becomes clear that Imai is not a painter of “modern life,” as Charles Baudelaire would have it, but of everyday life. While most of us can identify with the ritual of making toast, the daily world that Imai paints is decisively her own, and while made up of moments of life—or lives—lived on a domestic scale, it encompasses an entire universe.

So how does one paint a portrait of one’s own lived experience through the filter of the still life? That seems to be one of the most important questions that Imai’s paintings address. Her canvases are populated by a menagerie of characters enlisted from the intimate sphere of the space that the artist shares with her partner and their three children. Moving through her paintings, we come across, among others, plush versions of Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and Lucy from Charles Schultz’s Peanuts comics, a Chewbacca mask and toy, an E.T. figurine, a one-eared toy dog the artist has christened “Vincent van Dog,” and sundry teddy bears. Imai deploys these figures in her work neither as ironic effigies of some kind of post-Pop consumer culture nor as a taxonomy of archetypes, but rather as a mute yet nonetheless resonant Greek chorus drawn from the flow of popular cartoon and film characters whose merchandising flotsam populates our living rooms and our children’s bedrooms, or, to be more accurate in this case, the artist’s own lived space. To view the resulting paintings over time is to partake in a never-ending, floating dinner party with a guest list as familiar as it is strange.

While Imai’s subjects may be seemingly inanimate objects, they nevertheless convene on her picture plane in order to loquaciously tell stories that exude sincerity, quietude, stillness, melancholy, and joy. When standing in front of her paintings one does not look at them, one enters them, pulled into their gravitational field by the dreamlike glow of her oil paints and the familiar (and familial) proximity of her subjects. Indeed, to cross the threshold of her canvas is to find oneself in the middle of a conversation that induces a state of somnambulant reverie. One can see this in her oft-repeated motif of a stuffed bear with a banana that she titles Melody. In this work a lovingly worn yellow bear reclines in a cradle fashioned from a ripening banana. Both banana and bear seem to float dreamily in a loosely defined atmospheric space suffused with a golden chiaroscuro. The artist came to this glowing, otherworldly hue while watching an advertisement for a popular Japanese television drama called Say You Love Me that depicted two lovers standing waist-deep in a body of glistening golden water. The reclining bear floating on its banana berth in a sea of liquid light suggests repose and relaxation while simultaneously hinting at a more somber possibility: a fruit-built funereal bier setting sail into the unknown. When discussing this work, the artist herself invokes the mythological river in Japanese Buddhist tradition that one must cross in order to enter the afterlife: “To match the lullaby-like scenery, I chose the title Melody. I can only wish the crossing of the Sanzu River may also be as peaceful.”1 In this work, life, death, and harmonic convergence are all poignantly and lovingly conveyed with an economy of means through a few masterful strokes of oil paint and some readily available items from the artist’s kitchen and living room. If the story that Melody tells is open to a wide range of readings, that is by the artist’s own design; this tale, much like the words brought together in a poem, evokes a multiplicity of possible meanings.

There is an undeniably poetic quality to Imai’s paintings in both a metaphorical and a practical sense. Practically, like a poet does with words, she creates collisions between objects—or more accurately subjects—her brushstrokes imbuing them with life and conjuring a soft, painterly version of the Kuleshov effect in cinema, through which meaning is created in the gaps between images. In Lovers (2022), for example, plush incarnations of the “frenemies” Charlie Brown and Lucy from Peanuts are thrown together into a new, counterintuitively intimate configuration. Recast as a besotted couple, the cartoon antagonists are pulled into sharp focus by Imai’s brushstrokes amid a lush, softly enunciated “wilderness” or perched expectantly in the branches of a houseplant, gazing happily onto an unknown future. As the artist herself suggests when discussing the mise-en-sc.ne of her works: “At first, it is just a combination of things. As I arrange them, a story comes to me from the other side.”2 We see the results of this strategy in works such as Green Gables (2022), in which a still-life scene is composed of a green-roofed dollhouse inhabited by a motley crew of housemates drawn from her children’s toy box and the wider popular cultural imaginary. A Chewbacca mask finds itself in a rather Brobdingnagian position, filling the entirety of the upper floor, while a more appropriately scaled E.T. figurine welcomes visitors from the front porch as a bear-shaped bottle of honey stands sentinel on a nearby shelf that is also home to an aquarium. When looking at this composition it becomes clear that this is not a still life at all but rather a metaphorical mise en abyme of domesticity—or rather, a series of worlds within worlds. Entering through the framing of Imai’s picture plane, we explore the dollhouse, the fish tank, and the microcosmic universe of this domestic scenario in which potted plants become nebulae and a window looking onto a garden becomes the background radiation of an expanding personal galaxy. This is the humble, if expansive, poetic conflagration that lies at the heart of Imai’s paintings. In bringing objects from her immediate surroundings together within the purview of her artistic gaze, she creates a kind of painterly lexicon that can be drawn upon over and over again to evoke stories that might be personal but also resonate beyond the confines of autobiography. As the artist herself avers, “Like a child trying to achieve a flawless arrangement within a small dollhouse, I repeatedly set up my paintings until I reach a perfect sense of the world.”3 Within these paintings a life and a home unite to create an intimate poetic cosmos.

Life is both motivating force and subject in Imai’s work. This pertains, certainly, to the specificity of the artist’s own life, with all its particularities and vagaries, but also to the idea of life writ large as it relates to the objects that construct her (and our own) daily environments. In Imai’s paintings Waiting (2022) and Break time (2022), for example, we see two of her main recurring protagonists— a Chewbacca mask and a plush Snoopy, respectively—seemingly arrested in a kind of suspended animation, waiting for life to be breathed into them through the act of play. Looking at these works raises the question of who is waiting for whom, as these purportedly inanimate objects are, in the end, very clearly neither inanimate nor objects at all but rather seem to be imbued with a vitality that exceeds their former status as toys. In Imai’s works we very quickly move from animation to animism as a few strokes of her brush bring her pantheon of fellow travelers to life in order to tell her stories and their own. Is Chewbacca waiting for a child to don him in a moment of puckish glee, or is it someone outside the frame of her canvas doing the waiting? Who is taking “break time” anyway? The child who belongs to Snoopy or Snoopy himself? As there are no people directly rendered in Imai’s works, her subjects’ own boisterous agency is revealed. As the sixteenth-century French writer and so-called inventor of the personal essay Michel de Montaigne mused, expressing a radical decentering of the egocentrism of the then-emerging phi- 30 31 losophy of humanism: “When I am playing with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me?” Montaigne’s question expressed the writer’s gradual revelation that one should enjoy the pleasures of life rather than waiting for a reward in the afterlife, a position at odds with many tenets of the Christian Stoicism prevalent at the time. Imai shares the French philosopher’s wondrous and exuberantly liberating embrace and celebration of life’s most mundane and inconsequential moments and conveys them through the surrogacy of the animated objects in her home that look at her every morning with warmth and appreciation. Like Montaigne’s cat, Imai’s oil paint apparitions of Chewbacca and Snoopy play with us as much as we play with them.

Imai has held a long-running fascination with and an incredible respect for the history of Western painting, as can be seen in works such as Old Man (2022), in which a stuffed bear in the high grass seems to take on the atmospheric existential searching of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), or Ophelia (Lucy) (2022), in which the at-times dyspeptic Peanuts character playfully takes on the role of the ultimate Shakespearean tragic woman in the manner of John Everett Millais’s quintessential expression of Pre-Raphaelite sensibility, Ophelia (1851–52). One can even see her affinity for this history in her naming of the one-eared toy dog that appears over and over again in her paintings such as Nocturne (2022). Found by the artist in a Parisian secondhand market, Vincent van Dog alludes to the loss of the painter Van Gogh’s ear and other sensational aspects of his story while also standing in as the artist’s avatar, his missing ear a subtle acknowledgment of the fact that Imai was born with a severe hearing impairment. In this vertical work in two parts, he stands as a sentry amid the trees of the artist’s garden in a shower of light and shadow that evokes the history of the night scene genre, from Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642) to Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon (c. 1825–30) and on to James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket (1875). Like those historical precedents, Imai’s Nocturne seems to radiate with an inner light, as if this nighttime scene were being shot “day for night” by a cinematographer. The artist has previously alluded to such painterly illumination in her work: “In the dark room, it looked like the picture I had painted on a small canvas was glowing. Since that time, I have been interested in the style of painting in which the canvas produces a slight glow. . . . I imagine that an object is emitting light from inside.”4

While Imai’s dedication and indebtedness to the technical aspects of the history of painting are apparent, what sets her work on its own path is its embrace of the more ephemeral moments of life, those liquid “there and gone” episodes of serendipity such as a ray of sunlight breaking through the living room curtains and illuminating a sleeping cat as the earth slowly turns. Imai captures such slices of the minor wonders of the world throughout her work, whether conveying the deadening silence of the landscape after a heavy snowfall in Holy Night (2022), rendering the moonlight shining through the limbs of a tree in another iteration of this motif in a different work by that title, or depicting a deer caught unawares in a field during a summer shower in Rain (2022). Her paintings continually reveal an embrace of the quiet and overlooked fragments of everyday life—whether in the world at large or within her own domestic sphere—that we might associate with the notion of “care.” In her 2022 painting by that title, two stuffed bears dressed in bathrobes accompany their friend Chewbacca on an excursion through a field of flowers. Everything about this wandering trio exudes the character of a family out on a Sunday walk. At one with the earth, the sky, and the vegetation in the fields, they are bathed in a warm light that, as in many of Imai’s works, seems to emerge from within the painting itself. The origin of the word “care” in the Latin cura brings to mind the Roman myth of the goddess of the same name, who was said to have created humans out of clay, or the humus of the earth. After asking Jove to give her creation spiritus, or breath, an argument broke out. As a result, Cura could remain with her creation as long as it lived, but after its death Jove would receive the being’s spirit and Tellus (earth) would receive its body. As in this myth, Imai’s animated effigies have had life breathed into them through a painterly expression of care, which they then return to both the artist and the viewer.

Surrounded by such merry bands of children, Imai can be simultaneously at home with her family in Kanagawa, Japan, and at one with the world. Choosing life as its focus and care as its motivating principle, her practice gives a more intimate and inward-looking spin to Baudelaire’s description of the ideal painter of modern life:

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.5

For Imai this multitude is found not in the outside world at large but rather within the confines of her own home, amid a crowd whose composition reflects the familial flotsam and jetsam that surrounds each of us. It is here, as a flaneur in the intimate space of the domestic and the everyday, that she finds the center of the world while exploring the wondrous flow of the fugitive and the infinite.

1 Ulala Imai, Melody (Tokyo: Parco, 2021), n.p.

2 Ulala Imai, artist statement in Andrew Cranston, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Ulala Imai, Nathaniel Oliver (New York: Karma, 2022), 12.

3 Ibid.

4 Ulala Imai, Gathering (Tokyo: Baci, 2021), n.p.

5 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Phaidon Press, 1964), 9.