2023Hiji Nam

There’s a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: “Where was I before I was born?” In the beginning was . . . what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.

—Angela Carter, The Curious Room (1996)

Ulala Imai’s paintings are autobiographical landscapes of the heart, of the self, and of family history. She uses a buoyant palette of greens, blues, and yellows to paint the landscapes of her home in clean, soft, precise strokes, which hum with a distinctly luminous quality that brightens the senses: the backyard garden covered in a quiet layer of snow, the soft glow of moonlight peering through trees (Holy Night, 2022), the scent of ripe summer peaches or oysters with lemon (Peaches, 2021, and Oyster, 2022), alongside closeup scenes of a matted teddy bear lying atop a banana hammock (Melody, 2022), and a Snoopy figurine seemingly abandoned and forgotten in the grass but wearing a light smile, as if in a tranquil dream (Break time, 2022). Though set within the playfully ungarnished, borderline anarchic domesticity of the artist’s live-work space, which she shares with her three children and partner in Japan, her whimsical pictures are frequently inflected with flights of fantasy. There are the tactile and visual delights of children’s toys assembled together like an army (Gathering, 2022), and in Ophelia (Lucy) (2022), the English flora and riverbed conveyed in John Everett Millais’s canonic painting has been swapped for the artist’s backyard ecosystem, with Peanuts’ Lucy van Pelt cast in the role of Hamlet’s Ophelia; while in Lovers (2022), Charlie Brown and Lucy are set within a psychedelic composition amongst blades of grass, as if the viewer were tripping on mushrooms with the characters through the expansively inviting large-scale canvas. Like the characters in Charles Schulz’s comic strip, who feature frequently in the painter’s compositions, Imai’s pictures are both simple and complex, manifesting the psychological, historical, and philosophical dimensions of the world through clever uses of pictorial language combined with unique, precocious characters.

Tending toward the charmingly cluttered and colorfully overblown, her compositions might be thought of as a series of interconnecting rooms that manifest a child’s omnivorous, gluttonous curiosity for the world. In The Scene, Imai has taken her cast of characters—drawn from everyday yet symbolically fibrous objects and associations— and transported them into a magical mannerist fable world in the topsy turvy scale of Alice in Wonderland, crossed with scenes from classical mythology, works by master painters, and pop culture. In the serene portrait Rains (2022), a fawn gazes coquettishly back at the viewer before a masterfully rendered forest, in a nod to Gustave Courbet or Gerhard Richter’s deer paintings, while in Care (2022), a pair of brightly bath-robed bears and a grinning Chewbacca (the loyal companion of Han Solo in Star Wars) are found mid-stride within a field of blooming flowers, reminiscent of the scene of poisonous poppies in the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz. Here, stuffed animals and toys are transformed into the paintings’ central protagonists, imbued with a sense of origin, temperament, and destiny, and becoming metamorphic, even mythic, characters.

Imai’s painting practice seemingly breaks all codes of “serious” art—not brazenly, however, but serenely. This attitude, along with the artist’s refreshing lack of self-consciousness or drive to offer a conceptual or ironic wrapping of these scenes from her home life and family, prevents the work from veering into kitsch. There is an assured confidence in her hand and her approach. Her pictures could be shown within the pages of a poetic children’s book just as easily as an art gallery, and in their blurring of audience and intent, raise questions of which images and stories are for children, and which for adults. Most of the installation shots of The Scene feature her children as viewers, gazing up at their mother’s portraits of their personal plushies and living room. But, as Jacqueline

Rose writes in The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1994), if traditionally the adult has been conceived as the “author, maker, giver,” with the child as “reader, product, receiver,” Imai’s pictures hold the tension in between these two frames; her family members are her work’s first-row audience, and they are also, in their own way, co-creators.1 As such, her paintings inhabit the magic portal between maker-receiver, adult-child, dyads that are constantly in the process of soliciting and seducing each other.

The photographs of Imai’s home studio reveal the context within which she paints, surrounded by her children watching television, doing homework in a Spiderman suit, and playing the guitar. Imai is hearing impaired, and has remarked that she has no problem focusing on her work within the clamor of the home when she turns off her hearing aids; the aural muteness of her painting environment seems to translate into a heightened sense of visual experience in her paintings. “In terms of light, one day I got a lot of white asparaguses,” the artist has said. “When I drew the white asparaguses placed on the stainless steel, it suddenly looked like a fluorescent lamp that was emitting light. So I realized that my painting looks bright and glows naturally. It makes me feel brighter as well . . . I like to draw such quiet brightness, like the moment I leave home on a sunny, cold winter morning.”2 Imai’s style contains the kernels of a quiet veritas that could almost veer toward photorealism, but the blended, stylized execution of her brush veers us back into a space of the uncanny. This sense of enchantment is inflected with an enigmatic transparency that conjures the hallucinatory quality of a dream, of the variety that are vivid yet strangely lacking in depth, while conveying a sophisticated and subtle sense impression. In her world, every object seems illuminated and alive—the snow, the light, the wind, the toys, and the grass sentient as if animated by an interconnected world soul. In her pictures, viewers wander through a forest of both auditory and visual symbols, like nursery-rhymes that offer a bubble of comfort and reassurance, creating their own soundscapes.

The rooms she inhabits are crammed with quotidian wonders, a seemingly utopian place of blissful omniscience. In Green Gables (2022), a large dollhouse is perched precariously on a ledge in the artist’s living room, with rich garden foliage visible through glass windows in the background. Here, the porous nature of inside and outside is illustrated by the polymorphous cross-pollination of worlds, characters, and boundaries: inside of the house-within-a-house, E.T. stands on deck in a bathrobe, coolly reaching out a finger toward the viewer, while a Chewbacca bust dominates nearly the entire second floor. Nearby, a teddy-bear-shaped jar of honey is flanked by the dollhouse and what could be a mini home aquarium. The painting brought me back, too, to my own childhood: remembrances of watching Star Wars with my father, and being taken in by L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, which illuminated the suburban landscape of my own childhood with the title character’s spunk and verve, adolescent scrapes and indiscretions.

As an inadvertently potent imagist of the unconscious, Imai reconsiders spatiality in terms of the inhabitants’ psychic, imaginative interactions, renegotiating boundaries of self and other into a constellation that is transitional and kaleidoscopic. Gaston Bachelard wrote that the house is tied to the inner space of the artist’s mind, noting that “the house images are in us as much as we are in them . . . They trace the topography of our intimate being, and allow for an analysis of the human soul.”3 A home first requires the boundaries of an enveloping, infrastructural container; second, an interior, in which to seek refuge, rest, and rootedness, and to structure a sense of belonging. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry writes: “In normal contexts, the room, the simplest form of shelter, expresses the most benign potential of human life. It is, on the one hand, an enlargement of the body: it keeps warm and safe the individual it houses in the same way the body protects the individual within.”4

If our body is our first home, it is indelibly marked by its origins in the mother’s body and the departure from the maternal womb that marks the experience of birth. Maturation and development go hand in hand with separation and abandonment—a child’s first steps might be toward a parent, but eventually they will turn their backs as they head out the door to friends, to school, to society. Constructing an internally stable sense of home that takes into account these necessary instabilities might be seen as an ongoing task of Imai’s work. Home is the metaphysical space that has the power to integrate thoughts, memories, and dreams, where one’s fluidly amorphous multiplicity of selves might be reordered into a coherent subjectivity. It is also where that organized self might be thoroughly punctured by the ambivalent challenges of living within a family, an experience that as either parent or child is bound to be at once heartbreaking, maddening, and magical. View the canvases as an extension of the artist’s psychic skin, imbued with Imai’s penchant for conjuring affective space—where symbolic connotations resonate at multiple levels of imagery, in a fluid, dynamic reflection of the body’s lived experiences and the tension between being contained and the act of containing.

In these works, then, we are able to glean the artist’s negotiations with multiple layers of protected intimacy that are constantly in flux with ruptures and integrations that interanimate each other. For the artist and her family of collaborators, everything in these rooms must be familiar and loved, and loved because they are familiar; the home as such can be viewed as a microcosm of the personalities and passions of their inhabitants, and her pictures as a domestic deconstruction executed by an expert psycho-geographer who has turned the toy boxes of this sphere inside out to reveal the aesthetics of things both unveiled and hidden. Hers is an account of domesticity and motherhood, with interiors that are not solitary, confined, and private, but rather open-ended, multitudinous, polyphonous territories that are marked by the playful, imaginative inner landscape of their occupants. “Since I was a kid, when my dad drew sketches during our family trips, we had to wait for a long time until he finished [them],” she has remarked on her own childhood with her painter father. “At that time, I was like, ‘How boring landscape paintings are!’”5 And yet, Imai is herself a masterful landscape painter of the home, one who approaches subjectivity from the outside in. She begins from the atmosphere surrounding the body rather than vice versa, reminding the viewer that space is never neutral but constantly colored by ambient projection, memory, and fantasy.

In Peanuts, you may remember, Lucy moonlights as a psychiatrist who hawks her services at a lemonade stand for five cents; in one exchange, Charlie Brown (who despite more than half a century of a syndication ages very slowly in Peanuts, settling at around five years old within the confines of his world’s floating timeline) is probed by Lucy:

“Have you ever seen any other worlds?”

“No,” answers Charlie.

“As far as you know this is the only world

there is, right?”

“Right.”

“You were born to live in this world, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, LIVE IN IT, THEN! . . . Five cents, please.”

The process of painting these scenes seems to be an attempt to metabolize a period of the artist’s life as an artist and mother—so as not to let it pass by unnoticed, and to index it as preciously as gold. Unlike Charlie Brown, children do grow up, toys are boxed up into the attic, fantasy, imagination, and fiction traded in for what is considered reality. Thus we might see Imai’s paintings as loving portrayals that take Lucy’s advice, with the artist resolutely LIVING in the humble, mundane, and often frustratingly humdrum flow of the parent and child’s daily comingling environment, and also pausing, translating, and transforming it into something enigmatic, complex, breathing, and alive—that is, art, with a life of its own.

1 Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, Rev. Ed. (Houndsmills, UK: The MacMillan Press, 1994), 2.

2 Ulala Imai in Atsushi Takayama, “A Change in the Painter Ulala Imai’s Emotional State,” Tokion (August 5, 2021): https://tokion. jp/en/2021/08/05/painter-ulala-imai/.

3 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), xxxvii.

4 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 38.

5 Imai in Takayama, “A Change.”