CAROL Shimoda
SHIMODA Emiko

キャロル霜田

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October 16th 2020, 1:29pm

For most of the 1980s Emiko (Carol) Shimoda was one of Japan's most popular and successful illustrators. Her portraits of both famous and obscure Japanese (Shimoda's people are always smiling) were regularly featured in magazines and advertising. Her work crosses all boundaries, achieving a style that is both ironic and celebratory, pleasant yet formally thrilling. For her comics work, Shimoda adopted a style parodying girls' romance manga of the 1960s. On the surface as charming as her portraits, Shimoda's manga is, however, even more double-edged. She delights in dropping shocking and incongruous elements into the confines of the popular romance aesthetic. In 1985, at the height of her fame, Shimoda picked up and moved to the United States, where she got married and settled in Queens. She voluntarily abandoned art for a number of years and, along with her husband (himself a Burmese immigrant), ran a laundry in her Corona neighborhood, and then a Karaoke bar on Manhattan's Upper West Side. In 1994 she returned to drawing and painting, prolifically completing over two hundred portraits within the summer, this time of American subjects from all walks of life (still smiling). She hopes to have a New York gallery exhibition of this recent work and envisions inviting all of her portrait subjects to the opening.

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Female

Adult(1)  Horror(1)  Mature(1)  Seinen(1)  Slice of Life(1) 

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