One of the words for art in Japanese is bijutsu which contains the kanji character for “beauty” (美). That’s not to say that art is limited to images of beauty alone, however. Sometimes images considered superficially unpleasant can be seen as beautiful works as well. They have the power to push back the darkness of taboos and help us to overcome our own inhibiting fears and prejudices.

Those are pretty heavy concepts for sixth-grader Chifu Onishi, but she seems to have already excelled at them through her celebrated artwork such as Tsuki Ni Asobu (Play on the Moon) which was chosen as a part of the 82nd annual Dokuritsu Exhibition, an annual event that has featured some of Japan’s greatest artists in the past. This acknowledgement also earns the 11-year-old the recognition of being the youngest artist to ever take part.

■ Play on the Moon

The Dokuritsu Exhibition has been ongoing since before World War II and is unique in its judgment of art regardless of fame, age, or background. Established artists compete on exactly the same footing as schoolchildren such as Onishi. In this year’s exhibit only 700 of the 1,989 works were chosen.

Tsuki Ni Asobu probably isn’t what you’d expect an 11-year-old girl to produce, featuring a pair of dismembered skeletons piled in a marsh in front of a blood-red sky.

▼ “This picture makes me worry about the child’s mental state…”

On the other hand, there is nothing outright gruesome about the picture. At the bottom beautiful flowers can be seen jutting up from vividly blue water. When focusing less on the skeletons the red backdrop appears to take the form of autumn leaves.

Onishi is tight-lipped on what the painting is meant to symbolize. She would like to let each viewer interpret Tsuki Ni Asobu in their own way. She did say, however, that she is attracted to scary things because they are more honest, and that smiling faces tend to lie more.

▼ Onishi’s Jugen Fukkatsu also won a prize at the Osaka Prefectural Sayamaike Museum’s 13th Children’s Art Contest

■ Part of the Family

Chifu Onishi lives in Tondabayashi, Osaka with her father, Hirofumi, who divorced from Chifu’s mother when she was five. During first and second grade sports festivals, she came in dead last during footraces. Determined to boost her self-confidence, Hirofumi took his daughter running in park in preparation for the third grade race. However, when the following year came, she again finished in last place.

Dismayed Hirofumi confronted his daughter asking her if she could be content being in last place for the rest of her life or if there was anything she could be good at. She answered determinedly that she was good at drawing, a hobby she picked up while sketching stag beetles from a popular video game Mushi King.

“Fine then. Draw every day,” he told her, and she did. Each day she would work with either a pencil or brush in her hand for no less than three hours. She started by trying to reproduce paintings found in art books lying around the house. Then her art teacher recommended practicing drawing people by first learning to draw bones.

Following her teacher’s advice Chifu drew human bones from anatomy books, until one day her father came home with a surprise: a full-sized human skeleton like you might find in a biology classroom. She described the skeleton as unsettling at first but the more time they spent with it, the more it became like a part of the family.

“I especially liked looking at the face. I would stare at it and wonder what they looked like when they were alive.”
(Chifu Onishi)

A skeleton is merely an image of inanimate human bones which only has the power that we ascribe to it. By rejecting such imagery with outright revulsion we might deprive ourselves of something beautiful beneath its surface. In the same way, perhaps by facing our shortcomings head-on without fear or anger we can find success within the failures of our lives.

*Tsuki Ni Asobu will be on display at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art from 27 November to 7 December

Source: Asahi Shimbun, Hachima Kiko, Sayamaike Museum (Japanese)