Aya Takano

Aya Takano (タカノ綾, Takano Aya^?, born December 22, 1976) is a Japanese Superflat artist, manga artist, and science fiction essayist.

Takano was born in Saitama, Japan. She spent her childhood reading her father's library, which consisted of many books on natural sciences and science fiction. Exotic animals and landforms combined with an urban city are common themes in her artwork, and are intended to show the juxtaposition between future and fantasy. Takano cited in a documentary made by the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin that she was always fascinated by the unusual forms of nature and animal life, and desires to have such shapes represented in her work.

Osamu Tezuka's science fiction was another early influence in Takano's life, and had a lasting impact on her dreamy perception of the world. She cites in the book Drop Dead Cute by Joan Vartanian that she really believed everything she read was true until she was nineteen. Takano states that sometimes even now she imagines possessing the ability to fly and is uninterested in the constrictions of being grounded.

When it was time for her to start thinking about college, Takano told her parents she wouldn't attend unless she was allowed to enter an art program. In 2000, she received a bachelor's degree from Tama Art University in Tokyo, and, soon after, became an assistant for leading Japanese Contemporary Artist Takashi Murakami, the founder of the Superflat art movement, who became her first mentor and jump-started her career.

Murakami was looking to exhibit the work of young artists and to help create an artistic community for like-minded artists that used the Superflat style. The Superflat movement, popularized by Murakami himself, is about emphasizing the two dimensionality of figures, which is influenced by Japanese manga and anime, while dually exposing the fetishes of Japanese consumerism. Through the basic ideas of this movement, he created the Kaikai Kiki Co., a group where five out of the seven members are women.

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