Yuka Kashihara saw something while scuba diving in Okinawa late last year. The Japanese artist wasn’t looking down into the abyss, but up to see bubbles trailing toward the surface. “[They] looked like stars in the night sky,” she recalls. “In that moment, I felt that everything was connected.” Back on land, the painter shared the thought with her diving partner, the neuroscientist Nobuko Nakano, who recommended the book The Magic Furnace for further exploration. The 1999 tome became the inspiration for Kashihara’s new exhibition, aptly titled “Stardust.”
In The Magic Furnace, prolific science scribe Marcus Chown outlines the universal building blocks of our world. “Every flower you pick contains atoms blasted into space by stellar explosions that blazed brighter than a billion suns,” he explains. Kashihara drives home this principle in her latest compositions (on view through Dec. 8 at Palm Beach’s Acquavella Galleries), which at a glance could be either abstract landscapes or microscopic renderings of cells. A swath of blue here, a few lines of green there—is that a fish in water or mitochondria in motion?
One work, Bubble Star, 2025, is a clear recreation of the artist’s underwater vision, showing jagged light breaking through the waves, but even there, the bubbles puncture the canvas much like another form of interplanetary light. The artist’s paintings have long been inspired by her travels (“driving across the North American continent, walking the Milford Track in New Zealand, climbing Mount Kinabalu on the island of Borneo”), but with “Stardust,” she moves beyond these disparate touchpoints and toward a kind of thesis about the interconnectedness of the places she’s been.
“It became clear that I, too, am made of stardust,” Kashihara muses, “and that realization felt profoundly natural. [And all of] the primeval landscapes I have encountered in my life, if traced back far enough, [they too] were once stardust.” Wherever you go, there you are again.
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