STATEMENT:Woman Shooting Cherry Blossom

Yinka Shonibare CBE, Woman Shooting Cherry Blossoms, 2019, Unique fibreglass sculpture, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, bespoke hand-coloured globe, steel, brass, zamak, wood, resin, and silk, 244 x 193 x 436 cm, © Yinka Shonibare CBE, All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2020, Courtesy the artist and Fukuoka City Art MuseumYesterday browsing the international press, I looked again Yinka Shonibare’s CBE solo exhibition “Flower Power” at Fukuoka City Art Museum in Japan. Among the works of the exhibition his new commission for the Museum “Woman Shooting Cherry Blossoms” (2019), touched me deeply. So emerged this column, every Sunday, through a artwork we will comment on international news and hot issues arising. Cosmogenic themes and changes that concern and affect artists, art people and the entire international artistic community.

By Efi Michalarou

I met Yinka Shonibare CBE in 1998 at the DESTE Foundation in Athens, through the exhibition “Global Vision: New Art From The ‘90s (Part I) [7/5-28/6/1998]. Since then his work  has changed, and that’s natural. The graduate of London’s famous Goldsmith College, where the generation of New British Artists in the 90s emerged, through his multicolored dresses where figures were incorporated with male-female-childlike heads, with no obvious characteristics, since the head is often calling in mind the globe is dealing with racism and racial discrimination. But what really hasn’t changed in Shonibare’s work is the way he captures reality and the big issues that arise each time. His work “Woman Shooting Cherry Blossoms” (2019) is probably one of the most comprehensive I have come across recently, after is negotiating  concentrated on all the hot topics that concern humanity at the same time: Racism resulting from migration and destabilization of every economic, social or cultural right; the Trauma through Racism and Racial Discrimination; War , one of the main causes of all of the above; but also for the environmental disaster, along with people’s thirst for more and more profits that tends to dry all the natural resources and contributes to climate change, the biggest and most significant of the problems our planet is facing today.

Photo: Yinka Shonibare CBE, Woman Shooting Cherry Blossoms, 2019, Unique fibreglass sculpture, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, bespoke hand-coloured globe, steel, brass, zamak, wood, resin, and silk, 244 x 193 x 436 cm, © Yinka Shonibare CBE, All Rights Reserved, DACS / Artimage 2020, Courtesy the artist and Fukuoka City Art Museum