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Ayaïro’s Five Years – Constancy and Transformation
For the painter Ayaïro, the five years spanning from 2020—when she began her full-fledged career as an artist—to the present have been a period of extraordinary density and refinement. Within this passage of time, one can discern a consistent core of artistic inquiry that underlies her practice, as well as a range of developments—at times consciously pursued by the artist, at others seemingly emerging from her subconscious, and occasionally arising from the interplay of both intention and instinct. These developments have unfolded delicately and, at times, boldly.
Over these five years, Ayaïro’s artistic journey has matured while containing within it a dynamic tension between continuity (or perhaps even universality) and transformation. This brief text seeks to provide a bird’s-eye view of her work by unpacking the essence of these two forces—what remains unchanged and what has evolved.
The constant running through her oeuvre can be found in her deep-rooted fascination with memory, especially the kind that composes the primal landscapes of painting that gently stimulate something in our subconscious depths. Raised in a quiet suburban area of Tokyo, distant from the urban center, Ayaïro spent her early years surrounded by a natural tranquility that is now increasingly rare. The nostalgic sensibility that emerges from these formative experiences permeates her paintings. The impressions that struck her as a child remain vivid yet fragmentary, and it is precisely this nature that leads her to embrace compositions that are both simple and bold. These compositions are further brought to life by a vivid palette grounded in primary colors. This nostalgia, which acts as a trigger for collective memory, lies at the heart of Ayaïro’s artistic vision — even after she started depicting landscapes unrelated to her birthplace.
In contrast, however, her work has undergone continual transformation throughout the past five years. This evolution is all the more significant when seen in light of the persistent elements described above. A few years into her career, Ayaïro began visiting rural landscapes that are not part of her own memory. This shift marked a turn toward painting “other people’s” landscapes. Here, her work began to approach more archetypal memory—what might be called collective memory. In parallel with this thematic shift, her use of color evolved: the once strikingly vivid hues that represented intense personal memories gave way to gentler, more ambiguous tones that evoke the imagination.
What Ayaïro refers to as “adult recollections”—memories connected to others through the filter of imagination—have increasingly begun to merge, in her recent works, with her own early childhood memories (which she calls “childhood impressions” in contrast). In 2025, she has chosen to work with the motif of “water” as a method of exploring this fusion. As a fluid and formless substance, water serves as an ideal medium for expressing the haziness of recollection while also tying closely to the artist’s own personal memories.
While simultaneously embracing both drastic constancy and transformation, what might emerge from this fusion in Ayaïro’s evolving painting practice remains to be seen — One looks forward, with genuine anticipation, to the unexpected directions her practice will take next.
Hiroki Yamamoto, Cultural Studies Scholar
June 2025