Navigating the multifarious notions of self compounded by an integrated contemporary culture, Okokume's work reflects biographical introspection and visual influences that cannot be pinned down, challenging traditional hierarchies in art. Her signature character, Cosmic Girl, inspires tenderness and resonance within a global community through addressing themes of healing and hope.

In 2000 Takashi Murakami (b.1962) proposed a historical lineage and uniquely Japanese sensibility to the ‘super flat’ style, which he associates with the dynamic movement of two-dimensionality, anime and manga, otaku culture, pop, entertainment, media and the avant-garde.* He ends ‘A Theory of Super Flat Japanese Art’ (2000) by pointing out the ‘integration’ that necessitated the Superflat style.

It is the art at the centre of a Japanese culture that lacks prestige, authority, celebration, and cost. In it, however, one can see the budding saplings of a new future. For example, no one has yet taken a serious look at the image resulting from the integration of the layers of entertainment and art. But that integration is already occurring. Much integration is still underway. That integration is producing yet another “super flat” image: us.

Okokume (b.1985; Mataró, Spain) embraces this integration of influences and the blurring hierarchies of media forms in her practice, navigating her role as an artist with an acknowledgement of a shared global visual landscape and culture that has shaped her exposure to expression. Her paintings are anchored to her personal experiences and a desire to connect through the emotional depth she embeds in the figures within her work.

Her best-known creation is Cosmic Girl, a starry-eyed and innocent-looking character with a turquoise body, fluffy pink hair and two small horns on the top of her head. Cosmic Girl is stylised with rounded hikimayu eyebrows, which were popularised in the Japanese Heian period – a nod to the circulation of this visual motif in ukiyo-e prints and contemporary anime productions. In Glance Up (2020), she stands on another blue-tinted creature and reaches her hand out in a gesture of healing and a warm glow diffuses from her palm. Cosmic Girl relays Okokume’s concern for global climate change with a hopeful warmth and brightness, an antithesis to the doomsday narrative surrounding the crises.

Okokume, Glance Up, 2020. Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 60 × 50 cm. Exhibited at ‘Inside’, JPS Gallery Hong Kong. © Courtesy of the Artist.

Through works like Powerful, Amor Libre and By My Side (all 2020), Okokume developed her cosmic character to be an icon that is recognisable and relatable: although she harnesses the power to heal the world, her expressions – self-satisfied, in adoration or pensive – are always loveable and easily understood, even when removed from narrative cues. The appeal of a personified icon and its potential to motivate takes on an additional impetus under a culture driven largely by media. In a similar strand, Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s ‘Angry Girls’, who came to stand for a pro-peace and anti-nuclear weapon stance, garnered initial traction from a community that shared a visual language and concern for a wider problem. Okokume’s child-like guardian, with all its resonant charm, is a simultaneous reminder of the innocence and future we are called on to protect and of the power behind a unified motivation.