The drawings and large-scale acrylic paintings of Chinatsu Ban (born Japan, 1973) initially suggest the whimsy of children's book illustrations. Her imaginative narratives-featuring a recurring cast of figures, primarily little girls and elephants, and objects, such as apples, ice cream, and underpants—evoke significant events from her early life. The elephant, which has served as the artist's talisman and meditative device since childhood, is now her central motif. Ban recently made her first fiberglass sculptures of elephants, which bring to mind oversized piggybanks.

Ban combines personal symbolism with Japanese artistic traditions and aspects of contemporary pop culture in her work. She cites the formal characteristics of the Edo period in Japanese art (1615–1868) as influences on her style of using bright colors and simplified forms. Like other Japanese artists of her generation, Ban's content and style is also informed by the pictorial language of the kawaii (cute) subculture, which took hold in Japan in the 1970s, when objects featuring characters such as Hello Kitty were introduced. Now a pervasive aspect of Japanese culture, kawaii is globalized in merchandise and aspects of the entertainment industry like anime (animation), and manga (comic books).

FOCUS: Chinatsu Ban, the artist's first solo museum exhibition, comprises two small-scale sculptures of elephants and three newly created large-scale paintings. The paintings represent a new phase of Ban's imagery in which significant stylistic and conceptual changes begin to take place: the elephant is more abstracted, and the landscape is increasingly more mythical and epic. In these works, metaphor is derived from nature rather than from culturally produced objects.

Taken from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Website .