Aya Shimohara
About the Create! Magazine 10th Anniversary Book: Create! Magazine is honored to celebrate a decade of contemporary art by publishing a look back at previously selected artists: their achievements, career growth, and more since being published. Stay tuned for the book launch in fall 2026, and join our newsletter to stay up to date.
Aya Shimohara, featured in both Create! Magazine and the Create! Magazine10th Anniversary Book, is a contemporary painter based in Osaka, Japan. She develops mirror-like paintings that physically implicate the viewer, translating mediated perception into embodied experience. Her practice centers on the instability between image and observer, positioning painting as a site where seeing is continuously renegotiated.
Shimohara’s work examines how perception and subjectivity are constructed through images. By constructing reflective surfaces through layered painterly processes, she destabilizes fixed modes of viewing and challenges the assumption of a stable spectator. The viewer becomes both subject and image, caught within a shifting perceptual field.
Her paintings are defined by the use of multiple ground treatments within a single support, allowing different materials to coexist while maintaining their distinct properties. This approach produces subtle variations in texture and reflectivity, generating layered visual conditions that unfold through the viewer’s movement.
Shimohara has exhibited internationally, including at CICA Museum, South Korea; a university-affiliated gallery at Central Wyoming College, US; and a commercial gallery in New York. Her work has also been presented at Diaf (Daegu International Art Fair) and Art Expo New York.
Artist Statement
Using panels that resemble digital devices, I create paintings with selfie compositions and mirror painting on the theme of the relationship between others and self and the ambivalent nature of having incompatible feelings at the same time that is highlighted by online activities.
https://www.ayashimohara.com/
