Artist Maho Kawai proves computers can have soul

Text and photographs by Eric Prideaux

Artist Maho Kawai would make the old ukiyo-e artisans proud.

Like the masters centuries before her, Kawai renders her subjects in gentle lines while leaving swaths of space behind them dreamily blank. That, however, is where the similarities end. Far from any throwback to the Edo period, Kawai’s prints - many of which are self-portraits - are very much the product of a modern world. Her main artistic tool, a G4 Macintosh, isn't the only thing that sets this tech-savvy 32-year-old apart from her wood-and-chisel forbears. Mostly it's her urban funkiness. In one piece, Kawai portrays herself with a colossal Afro a bit like her own hairdo. Hokusai, roll over!

Mention computer graphics, and most people think of the bright colors and exact angles of a Nintendo game. However, the hues in a Kawai print - earth brown, tomato red, autumn-leaf orange - are borrowed straight from nature, and her lines are endearingly unstraight. So one is surprised to learn that each print was stored on a hard drive before finding its way to the gallery wall. Ask her, and the artist will tell you that just about the only low-tech materials she uses are a calligraphy brush and stationery paper - both of the variety found at a local 100 yen shop. The rest is digital. “I use my computer as paint,” she says.

Kawai draws the outline of her subject on paper and scans that image into her computer. Using Photoshop software, she adds color and creates the impression of texture by pasting in close-up photographs of bricks, bathroom tiles, or other objects that have irregular surfaces. She rolls out the final copy on a high-quality printer. For something born of a machine, the result is astonishingly warm and personal.

Kawai’s prints are a room-by-room tour of her quirky imagination. In “Squash,” she depicts herself dwarfed by her jungle of bushy hair, sipping soda through an impossibly serpentine straw - an image inspired by a song. In “Washing Place,” we catch her enjoying a bath in the kitchen sink, something she saw somebody do in old photograph. Despite the references here to modern life, one detects a hint of tradition. Like the 18^th century woodblock artists Sharaku and Suzuki Harunobu, Kawai draws attention to subjects by placing them on empty fields of color. For the viewer, the effect is of peering in on a mindscape uncluttered by the excess detail of reality.

Does the fantasy roam too far? Kawai shows herself in one piece swabbing her ear - what would have been a humdrum theme had she not removed the ear from her head and placed it on a table. (“I got the idea in a dream. It seemed so convenient.”) While the concept would strike some as just beyond the boundaries of good taste, the print’s delicacy allows it to charm rather than offend. Besides, such immodesty pokes fun at old-fashioned restraints on Japanese women. Grandmother wouldn’t think of such behavior.

Kawai and her husband Yoshiyuki Wada　live in a rural town outside Tokyo where, working at home they have lots of time to nurture their creativity. However, Kawai had a long wait before that freedom came. After graduating from a two-year training program, she spent years at various companies designing packaging and other products - work she found oppressive. So, she quit and became a waitress at a hamburger restaurant where, ironically, she found a better outlet for her talent: creating menus. At first she drew food, later people and within a few years her simple sketching turned into bigger artistic projects.　It isn’t easy making a living on prints alone, so she also designs interiors together with her husband.

At a gallery in Shibuya, Kawai recently wrapped up her second show, a series of prints featuring decrepit buildings that she and Wada passed on a trip to Kyoto. The structures, rusted and mildewed, direct our attention backward in time. And yet, the discreetly high-tech rendering somehow also evokes some brighter sci-fi time to come. The two-way meshing of analog past and digital future comes off because of Kawai's gentle touch. Of course, software helps. "If you know the functions," says Kawai, "computer art needn't look like computer art at all."