Japanese artist Yukino Ohmura creates gorgeous night time cityscapes of Tokyo and other cities by using thousands of ordinary dot stickers. With just colored dot stickers bought from a stationary store, items typically reserved for mundane tasks like color-coding files, these locations become instantly recognizable against black canvases. Only two materials are used to create these artworks: colored dot stickers and black acrylic paint. Yet, the finished artworks glow vibrantly and come alive in a dreamlike sky of bright stars.
French writer Emile Zola, in describing his home city, once wrote, “The tiny dancing flames had bespangled the sea of darkness from end to end of the horizon, and now, like millions of stars, they burned with a steady light in the serene summer night. There was no breath of wind to make them flicker as they hung there in space. They made the unseen city seem as vast as a firmament, reaching out into infinity.”
Whenever I fly out of New York, en route to Singapore, my flight departs in the evening. As the plane gradually ascends into the kohl sky, I find myself irresistibly drawn to the view outside my window every time. Shimmering like tiny gemstones, the city below is breathtaking and it is a magical feeling to be suspended between the man-made bright lights below and the sparkling stars above.
In her artist’s statement, Ohmura poses the question, “I wonder how you feel when you see those gorgeous and beautiful night views made of simple stuff. Illusion turns out to be truth by keeping a distance from it, and truth may turn out to be illusion too. We are trying to struggle in this world which is filled with uncertain and unstable truths. My art works are part of the truths cut out from this chaotic world.”
