HAELY CHANG, Jane and Raphael Bernstein Associate Curator of East Asian Art
Can a painting simultaneously convey both the fragility and the resilience of life? Yuri Shimojo's Mirror 1 (Guns and Petals) embraces impermanence as a central theme to evoke compassion and hope through powerful motifs, an unconventional medium, and a meditative resonance.
Mirror 1 is composed of three distinct sections—a brown background, a pink and white mound of petals, and a central mirror. The brown pigment used throughout the painting was created by North Carolina–based ink master Thomas Little from a melted shotgun. Through an alchemical process, Little dissolves iron from guns into pigment, a practice born from his grief and trauma after losing friends to gun violence. Shimojo's collaboration with Little emerged at the intersection of life and death—while she was battling breast cancer, twenty-one lives were lost in the Uvalde school shooting in Texas. She grappled with profound questions: Is my life more worthy of saving than theirs? How can I contribute to the world with the time I have left? Art became her response, and she pushed herself to continue drawing, painting, and sharing.
The message of resilience and hope extends to other elements of the painting. At the bottom, a mound of cherry blossom petals symbolizes the artist's reflections on the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami—a natural disaster that claimed over 20,000 lives in Japan. Shimojo was deeply moved by news footage of cherry blossoms blooming amid the devastation. While the motif of cherry blossoms serves as a reminder of nature's resilience, it also reflects her longstanding practice of using art as a medium to communicate with the spirit world. Having lost all her family members before the age of thirty, Shimojo harnesses her art as a channel for connecting with those who are unseen but deeply felt. Each petal in the painting is uniquely shaped, symbolizing the individuality of the victims amidst the collective loss.
The mirror at the center likewise reiterates these themes. Shimojo utilized sumi ink, a traditional water-based Japanese pigment, to create a large empty circle at the heart of the composition. One can imagine the artist's recursive circular movement—both guiding and following the line—to form this mark. Shimojo often refers to the mirror as a portal, a place of refuge amidst life's turmoil. However, her mirror is not a boundary that confines but a space of fluidity where one can freely enter and exit, finding solace and protection from life's impermanence. It is also a place of connection where individuals can recover a sense of community. In Mirror 1, Shimojo reminds us that life and death coexist—and that the key to navigating the delicate threshold between them is to be found in togetherness.
Click here to view this object's catalogue entry.
