Childhood brims with fantastical figures that guide our first intuitive encounters with the complexity of the world. Imagination shapes this process, acting as a filter that preserves deeper ancestral patterns while protecting us from the rigid structures long imposed on human behavior and expression. As one grows in a social system, there is a gradual pressure to comply with these frameworks that compress lived experience into a single-direction narrative and shared codes of order and meaning.
Japanese artist Otani Workshop deploys art as a means of recapturing that feeling of receptive, unbiased expansiveness. “The world feels overwhelmingly complex to me, and I often feel that I cannot fully grasp everything in it,” he candidly tells Observer after the opening of “anima,” his latest show at Perrotin in New York. “Art that reflects this world is also complex, but there are moments that feel as simple as the play I experienced in childhood, and I hope to share that sense of simplicity through my work.”
The apparent naïveté of Otani’s whimsical human figures belie imagination’s ability to distill experience into essential elements that still carry meaning. In their clarity and openness, they invite a form of playful empathy, evoking the wonder that once shaped early discoveries yet often fades into the background of adult life.
Known for his whimsical, humanlike kawaii figures, Otani blends Japanese pop sensibility with the tactile quality of traditional ceramic techniques. In “anima,” he presents a new body of paintings, bronze sculptures, FRP and ceramics that inhabit their own symbolic world, offering metaphors that approach deeper and more nuanced states of the human condition.
Since 2017, Otani has lived and worked on the remote island of Awaji, off the coast of Japan, where he transformed an abandoned ceramic roof tile factory into a studio. There, in near-total isolation, he built a personal vocabulary free from trends or industrial influence, engaging directly with the land, using clay from Shigaraki and gathering memories through repurposed objects.
Walter Benjamin’s idea of “material imagination” aligns closely with Otani’s approach, in which ordinary objects take on new meanings when viewed with the “uncontaminated eyes of a child.” For children, the material world is endlessly reconfigurable, shaped not by inherent properties but by touch, play and improvisation. Benjamin notes that children do not merely imitate the adult world but reinterpret it, transforming discarded things into the raw matter of new symbolic realms.
Otani’s ceramic practice reflects this logic. Clay, for him, holds its own form of memory; it reacts, absorbs and shifts as he shapes it. This direct engagement enables him to imbue the material with a specific emotional charge before any recognizable form emerges. His sculptures rise as totemic presences, vessels of lived experience that echo the relationships people forge with each other and with the world. “When I look at a finished piece, it feels as if the sensations of that moment return to me, and viewers may sense something of that immediacy as well,” he says.
In his broader practice, the sense of play is unmistakable. His clay sculptures, like his paintings, appear raw, tactile and delightfully spontaneous, revealing the immediacy of his hand in the act of shaping. It is this vital spark—the anima that gives the exhibition its name—that moves through the work.
“The figures come to me in many different ways,” Otani says. “Some have clear origins—they may resemble me or members of my family. But there are also unexpected figures that suddenly appear while I am twisting clay in my hands or making casual sketches on paper.”
The clay figures, despite their kawaii appearance, engage through fluid, almost provisional forms that retain a strong sense of tactility and human presence. Clay itself behaves like a living material, able to hold traces of movement as it cracks, absorbs and transforms through Otani’s storytelling: “Clay is soft and remembers every movement of my fingers and hands. I like the feeling that my bodily thinking is recorded directly in the material.”
In his paintings, Otani preserves this responsiveness to touch, using a free-flowing process that explores the physicality of the work by molding and rematerializing archetypal forms. These figures become metaphors for human attitudes and relations. In this expanded space, the “monstrous” and the “other”—the experience of difference—are welcomed with a softness that invites connection rather than division.
Aligned with Kaikai Kiki Co.’s superflat aesthetic, Otani’s characters are intentionally open and innocent in affect, evoking the immediacy of early life—an expression of self before rationalization takes over. His work recalls Michael Meade’s notion of “mythical imagination,” with figures emerging from a pre-verbal, symbolic field, untouched by the ordering mechanisms of adult logic. They gesture toward a deeper, nonlinear temporality, similar to childhood, when experience unfolds through rhythms, sensations, and the unpredictable flow of attention.
At the same time, Otani’s work retains a strong sense of tenderness and domestic intimacy. In the Perrotin exhibition, he introduces cabinets and furniture pieces that become vessels, carrying emotions and recollections that lead us back to childhood’s unfiltered ways of perceiving. Drawers, cupboards, closets and small corners of domestic life function as containers for reverie—places where daydreams accumulate and cohere.
This intimate connection between memory and imagination is central to Otani’s artistic language. “I weave together my personal experiences and memories with the sensibilities I’ve developed through studying sculpture, ceramics, and painting,” he says. “I hope these personal memories and emotions resonate in a way that evokes universal empathy.” His work is, in other words, an invitation to look at the world with renewed attention through a gentle, inquisitive lens colored by curiosity and imagination.
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