Highlights
New Works Presentations
Toyohiko Nisijima
Atom Frog and Lotus
Stainless steel, semiconductors, handmade Washi paper, gold, mineral pigments
65 × 45 cm
A new work by Japanese artist Toyohiko Nishijima, Atom Frog and Lotus draws inspiration from the anime character Astro Boy (Atom-chan), an iconic figure whose significance lies not in technological power, but in humanism. Rather than celebrating speed, efficiency, or domination, Nishijima turns to Astro Boy’s defining traits, sensitivity, kindness, and ethical awareness, and reimagines them through a visual language that fuses tradition with contemporary technological imagination.
In postwar Japanese culture, Astro Boy represents a unique vision of technology: a machine endowed with empathy, moral hesitation, and care for life. He is not a conqueror, but a protector; not a symbol of progress as supremacy, but of coexistence between humans and machines. Nishijima carries this humanist lineage forward by transforming the figure into a frog-like hybrid, paired with the lotus, an ancient symbol of regeneration and emergence. The result is not a heroic body, but a vulnerable, transitional one, situated between nature, spirit, and circuitry.
Beyond this reference, alongside the frog figure appears a second character: a snail-like being that moves on continuous tracks, similar to caterpillar treads. This figure is not drawn from anime, folklore, or popular culture. It is Nishijima’s own creation. Unlike Astro Boy, which carries a recognizable cultural lineage, this tracked creature belongs to the artist’s invented ecology. Its slow, mechanical movement contrasts with heroic or efficient models of technology, proposing an alternative logic based on persistence, adaptation, and coexistence rather than speed or control.
Detail of Atom Frog and Lotus
Unlike images of technology as cold or authoritarian, the semiconductors in Atom Frog and Lotus function as connective tissue rather than instruments of control. They resemble nervous systems and flowing diagrams, structures that transmit rather than command. Technology is embedded, organic, and relational. The frog’s form suggests movement between states, land and water, nature and system, echoing Astro Boy’s own position between human emotion and mechanical construction.
The lotus, traditionally associated with clarity arising from complexity, appears not outside this technological field, but within it. Nishijima does not oppose tradition to innovation; instead, he allows spiritual and cultural symbols to emerge from within contemporary systems. Compassion, renewal, and ethical presence are shown to persist inside technological structures, not in retreat from them. The lotus does not resist the circuit. It grows through it.
Materially, the work reinforces this worldview. Stainless steel introduces industrial permanence and reflection, while handmade washi paper carries fragility, touch, and human labor. Gold and mineral pigments recall ritual, time, and tradition, grounding the work in historical technique even as it gestures toward futurity. The surface itself becomes a site of negotiation between the handmade and the engineered, the enduring and the delicate.
Atom Frog and Lotus is therefore not a nostalgic return to Astro Boy, nor a simple celebration of technology. It is a meditation on how human values, care, empathy, and responsibility, can inhabit the systems we create. Nishijima suggests that the future need not abandon sensitivity in favor of efficiency. Through this work, technology is not stripped of mystery, but reoriented toward coexistence. It invites us to live not above our systems, but thoughtfully within them.
