Photo: ©Claire Dorn. Image courtesy of Perrotin.
©2017 Aya Takano/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
She is… "a professional artist".
Aya Takano has a career spanning more than 20 years and exhibitions around the world, including Japan – where was born and lives – France and the USA.
The biggest or most important fight you had in your life?
I'm always fighting to escape the force of immobilization. I strive to maintain the pursuit of change and enjoyment, the desire for freedom and curiosity like a child.
Aren’t we all a mix of shadows and light? What are yours?
That’s true. Like the Yin-Yang sign, I think that both elements, shadows and lights are necessary for the world to keep rotating and revitalizing the life. Of course, I have both but trying to stay more on the side of lights.
The moment you reveal your strength most vividly?
I firmly protest when others try to deprive me of my freedom of mind, or when weak beings or nature are threatened.
Everyone has a conviction, a statement guiding our path, what is yours?
“Follow your bliss” are the words of Joseph Campbell, who was a mythologist. He said, “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you follow your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.” As a result of examining the myths of ancient and modern-day East and West, it seems that he came to that conclusion. I really love it, and I feel like I can understand it very much.
Mind Upload is the beginning of our heroine’s story. If you could augment yourself, what personal abilities would you expand?
I want to raise all five senses to a level that we can call supernatural powers. Perhaps human beings were much more sensitive to the five senses when they were facing the world with their own bodies alone in an era without external devices. Maybe everybody had a much better sense of taste, sight, and smell. And the mysterious sixth sense that everyone has experienced at least once in their lives, even if its existence is vague... I want to strengthen this sense also if it’s possible.
Encountering a magic wand, how do you redesign your future and ours, do you even use it?
Turn the city into a forest. Revive the ancient wisdom to live there.
Never give up… What would you say to your best friend or child?
As I said above, follow your bliss.
The best…
Feeling the sunlight is delectation.
