02.07-26.07.2025
Yokai Tea Party
Liisa Kruusmägi has been painting her thoughts and feelings, featuring people, animals, and the things around her in various environments. The bright colours of her paintings can make us breathe and rest in these anxious times.
During her residencies in Japan in 2015 and 2023, she observed her surroundings, searching for funny, new, and strange things, and painted them based on her observations. In the process, she became interested in the mysterious, weird, creepy, and sometimes humorous creatures that appear in Japanese folklore, known as Yokai. They have been brought into existence through the process of telling and passing on the strange phenomena born from people’s fears, anxieties, and mysteries as a shared experience. Kruusmägi is open to different cultures and to such creatures that are beyond human control. Additionally, she does not immediately impose a simplejudgment of good and evil on them. Yokai that enter the house through the window, that attend a tea ceremony, that eat ice cream, etc., look cute, humorous and somewhat familiar.
It is also related to the fact that when Kruusmägi walked around Japanese cities, she discovered that posters and signs almost always featured cute characters. The characters placed on the pine trees in her painting are generally small and cute. And the friendly gaze towards such things in Japan can already be seen in Sei Shonagon’s collection of essays, The Pillow Book, written in the early 11th century. What is affirmed there is childish, innocent and pure, and this attitude of admiring such incomplete and immature things still underlies Japanese culture even after more than 1,000 years. It overlaps with the approach of Kruusmägi, who does not find beauty in complete harmony and balance but instead appreciates the ephemeral and changeable nature of things.
Hirohisa Koike
Photos: Evert Palmets