Drop of Dreams

In 1950, while studying fashion drawing in Japan, Toshiko Okanoue had no confidence in her ability to draw and claimed to know almost nothing about the history of art. Working with scissors, paste and a stack of lifestyle and fashion magazines, she cut out the photographs that – in her own words – “fit my dreams” and arranged them on black flocked paper. “Those scraps of my fantasies turned into strangely interesting things,” she said, “things I would not have thought of. Emboldened and delighted by the results, I made one collage after another.” When an exhibition of her work opened in Tokyo in 1953, Okanoue’s collages were described as “a contemporary version of Alice in Wonderland.” Surreal in appearance, they are perhaps most remarkable for what they represent: a young Japanese woman’s perception of the Western way of life, as seen through her artless rearrangement of images clipped from such magazines as Life and Vogue. The work reproduced here was made between 1951 and 1956. In 1957 Okanoue married the painter Kazutomo Fujino and ceased making pictures. The publication of Drop of Dreams coincides with an exhibition of Okanoue’s collages at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Introduction by Ryuichi Kaneko.