YUKO SHIMIZU: CONTEMPORARY HEROINES

YUKO SHIMIZU: CONTEMPORARY HEROINES

How to combine Japanese and American illustration?

“What makes so interesting the illustrations of Yuko Shimizu, that many clients around the world has been hiring her to illustrate their posters for events and covers of magazines, albums and books?

This episode of Contemporary Art Theory, studies the art of this Japanese Illustrator based in New York.

(Introduction)
The overall experience of a Yuko Shimizu artwork is always a fully immersive world. It has a story within a specific scenario and consequently we can study each one of her artworks like we analyze movies.
There are three elements that help the artist to achieve this cinematic effect: The characters, the ambient and the technique.

1. 
   

   The Characters:
   In Yuko’s art,
   1) There is always a main character with a CLEAR FACIAL EXPRESSION: for example he or she is suffering, enduring, yielding, struggling, stretching or searching for something. In other words, there is always emotion and it is clear that the character is taking a side in an event.
   
   2) This is also supported by the fact that the character is in the middle of an action, he or she is DOING something, whether it is jumping, kicking, swimming or contemplating.
   3) The character is always portrayed from an unusual angle. Very rarely is a frontal view of a standing person as we see in our everyday lives. There are often tilt-up and tilt-down angles to emphasize dramatism in the composition and set the viewer as a particular witness.

   
   


2. 
   

   The Ambient.
   4) There are always many volatile objects that give the scene a feeling of frozen gravity and multidirectional weight. – There is constantly a signature collective behavior in those objects but very often, each one has a story to tell. For example arrows are flying around but some of them are broken or smashed. Birds are in the air but each one in a different moment of his flying process. This gives the composition the complementary sensation of variety within a unity.
   5) The environment plays a meaningful role because it is active. Either if it is fire, air, like in a strong wind or Water (in all different presentations like snow, splash drops, rain, clouds, waves). The elements are always present and always in movement.
   6) In Yuko’s artworks, Cultural icons are being revisited. So you know you are looking at a specific cultural reference, but now in a different context and with a different intention. So the spectator tends to look for new meanings and clues to experience the tradition in a contemporary way.

   
   


3. 
   

   The Technique:
   The feeling of the hand-drawing is protagonist. The strong silhouettes also give us a clear clue on the tradition of comic illustration.
   8) The texture of the paper is also present to create a warm sensation, like in a documentary film.
   The grading and vignette effects also help to generate a nostalgic image. The same happens when we discover beautiful illustrations in old books or watch shorts images from the first movies ever made.

   
   

As an overall conclusion:
9) And finally looking at the illustrations all together, in Yuko Shimizu’s portfolio: The viewer get’s the impression of proactive lives. There is never a feeling of coward neutrality or passiveness. These are the new types of heroes from which we would like to know more about, follow and join in their adventures.