Kaoruko Shima is a Japanese female artist, whose artworks are gender-oriented and her exhibition comprises the mixes of several expression means such as film, collage, painting, solid, and installation. You will notice her artworks are combinations of several materials regardless of the expression means if you see her individual artwork or the exhibition as a whole. For example, the film works created by the mixture of actual scenes and drawings, and the chair-like solid works sewed up with several cloths together, the collage pasted with newspaper clippings. These give us the point of view which both man and woman factors exist in a human being when it comes to the gender in cultural role, not physical role, and also the view which several constituents put all together and it becomes a human being. This theme applies to all of us not only in terms of the gender, but also in terms of the way of thinking that different views exit in oneself even for one thing in some cases.

Society is complicated and diversified no matter which we consider either the human being as an individual or the human being as a group, and various values exit. The artworks of Kaoruko Shima might be symbolic in this times that we need to accept the “diversity of society.”

Kaoruko Shima: born in 1988, Japan. B.F.A., Tokyo University of the Arts, department of intermedia art. Awarded from Tokyo wonder wall 2008. Art Melbourne 09, Australia 2009.

* The text provided by Gallery Terra Tokyo.

Opened dates: August 27 - September 25, 2010