AI KIJIMA: THE ART OF TEXTILE COLLAGE BETWEEN CULTURES AND NARRATIVES

| by Maria Rosaria Roseo |

Ai Kijima, a Japanese artist from Tokyo, has transformed her passion for textiles into unique and captivating works of art. Trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Kijima currently lives and works between Istanbul and Brooklyn, where she continues to explore and merge her multicultural experiences into textile collages that tell stories of cultures and identities.

A Passion for Fabric and Visual Storytelling

Ai Kijima’s works are the result of a creative process involving a wide range of heterogeneous materials, from vintage kimonos to children’s bed linens, second-hand clothes, and traditional fabrics. Her work is a collage of stories and meanings, where each fabric, each fragment, carries a personal, cultural, and historical narrative. Kijima uses these materials as pieces of a visual puzzle, creating compositions rich with images of faces, landscapes, and pop culture icons.

Kijima’s passion for textiles originates from her childhood spent exploring craft shops in her Tokyo neighborhood, where she developed a curiosity for collecting diverse materials imbued with meaning. A Superman bedsheet or a hand-stitched silk kimono, for Kijima, are not just material objects but symbols of different cultures and stories, intertwined in her artistic practice. This fascination with reusing and reinterpreting materials forms the foundation of her work, inviting reflection on the value of objects and their capacity to tell a story.

A Dialogue Between Traditional Techniques and Modernity

A distinctive aspect of Ai Kijima’s production is her combination of traditional techniques, such as quilting, with contemporary themes and subjects. Kijima places great importance on preserving cultural artifacts and emphasizing reuse—a principle rooted in Japanese traditions like boro and sakiori, where objects and fabrics are reused and transformed to honor their intrinsic value.

The artist goes beyond a passive approach to materials, reworking them to create pieces that, while anchored in the past, speak to the present and contemporary challenges. Her works invite reflection on mass culture and the tendency toward passive, superficial audience engagement, challenging the linearity of traditional narratives.

Collage as a Tool for Reflection and Critique

Kijima’s compositions are rich with colors, symbols, and references drawn from a vast array of cultural systems. While they may seem overloaded at first glance, the artist embraces this density as an opportunity to explore multiple meanings and perspectives on reality. Every element in the collage is an invitation to decipher a narrative that is never definitive but unfolds subjectively and personally. The audience is encouraged to interpret freely, to engage, explore, and imagine.

An intriguing aspect of Kijima’s work is her choice of ambiguous titles for her pieces, leaving room for individual imagination and reflection. Rather than imposing a single interpretation, she allows observers to construct their own meanings. In this way, collage becomes a tool for active participation—a window into multiple possible realities.

A significant chapter in Ai Kijima’s life and art was her time in Turkey, where she had the opportunity to explore the history of weaving and work with materials found in local markets. This journey further enriched her artistic language and left a lasting mark on her work.

Her artistic journey, which bridges Japanese tradition with an international context, is a continuous interplay of experiences and influences that fuel her practice. The cosmopolitan cities she has lived in—such as Istanbul, Chicago, and New York—serve as spaces for cultural exchange and confrontation, allowing her to embrace diverse perspectives and enrich her artistic vision.

A Work in Constant Evolution

Ai Kijima’s work, while rooted in a deeply personal and cultural vision, serves as a vehicle for universal reflection. Her layered compositions speak of an interconnected world where the past and present merge and reveal themselves through the language of textiles. Looking at her earlier works, such as Echo (1999), one can sense a constant evolution, an artistic journey that begins with intimate, painterly experiments and progresses toward creations that are immersive spaces where culture, materials, and time intensely dialogue.

Kijima continues to explore her practice, seeking new ways to tell stories, challenging conventions, and inviting every viewer to take one step further in understanding and interpreting the material reality.