In the room next to yours: Juka Araikawa

By Ang Kia Yee

“I had always found it unpleasant to have guests in my apartment. They filled up my rooms with strange sentences I would never have formulated in such a way. Today I found the sound of these sentences particularly unbearable. Sometimes I tried to follow only the sense of the conversation so as not to hear the sounds of the language. But they penetrated my body as though they were inseparable from the sense.”

– Yōko Tawada, Where Europe Begins

Juka Araikawa is an artist who, in her own words, “Captures figures in dream-like yet also uncannily familiar environments”. This description clings as one looks at her paintings, which employ gouache and oil on canvas, and watercolours and monotypes on paper. They are at once recognisable, as though drawn from the viewer’s memory, as well as unplaceable, forming worlds just out of reach.

Juka Araikawa Untitled (Head 4), 2018 Monotype on paper 38 x 28.5 cm

This practice of looking at the familiar as though outside of or alien to it seems to extend from Araikawa’s life into her paintings. Born in 1984 in Yokohama, Japan, Araikawa attended an international school, which made her feel like a foreigner, especially because she didn’t have Japanese friends. “I kind of had this way of looking… like from an outsider’s point of view,” she says in a 2013 video interview. Yoko Tawada, whose writing tugs at the strangeness of language and itself as a derivative of that strangeness, comes to mind, as does Haruki Murakami. Besides straddling languages and cultures, home and foreign environments, both Tawada’s and Murakami’s writings, like Araikawa’s paintings, convey an interest in the ways we co-exist and interact while remaining alien to each other.

An affinity definitely exists between Araikawa’s paintings and fiction writing at large, both of which consider time, pacing, and plot. She says, in that same video interview; “When I paint, I try to treat it almost like a theatrical space, and all the subject matters are collaged, and kind of built gradually.” Her positioning of these subjects, whether moving toward something outside of frame, or glancing at each other, alongside the details of their environments, evoke story, relationships, and action. And despite the gentle colours and soft shapes she seems to gravitate towards, dramatic tension is enacted by the dissonant co-existence of the familiar and unfamiliar. It prompts the viewer to ask: Where did these figures and objects come from? What are they doing together? Why are they here and, actually, where is here? Why, despite everything, do we feel so strange and foreign to each other?

Juka Araikawa Untitled (Head 6), 2018 monotype on paper 38 x 28.5 cm

Regarding her process, Araikawa says, “I usually start with really small sketches, and I use a projector to project these really simple sketches. And then I try to figure out how to translate it on a bigger surface, but still have this initial idea.” So her images tend to begin in a contained way, at a size one can carry. And in this way her process contains the child-like, innocent quality that her paintings convey, like a song being hummed in another room of your home.

Juka Araikawa Water Bearer 2, 2019 Watercolour on paper 40.5 x 30 cm

Araikawa is currently based in Los Angeles, where she acquired a BFA in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles. Outside of the United States, she has also exhibited in Tokyo, Košice, Singapore, Yokohama, Taipei and Paris. She most recently exhibited pieces with Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore, as part of Nothing Lasts Nothing’s Finished, an exhibition about transience and impermanence.

Juka Araikawa Catching a Moth, 2019 Watercolour on paper 40.5 x 30 cm