There are those who get a warm fuzzy feeling when they are reminded of the trappings of their middle-class childhood: the lace curtains over the sitting room window that wafted in the afternoon breeze; the old wooden wardrobe that sat in a corner of a bedroom; the bowl of peppermints at Grandma's.
And then there is Yuichi Higashionna.
Tokyo-born mixed-media artist Higashionna remembers these sort of things from his own quasi-Western adolescence, but the feelings they trigger are not nicely nostalgic but rather deeply disquieting. These reactions to childhood memories are the subject of the artist's recent work, a sampling of which is now showing at the Nadiff Gallery, located just off Tokyo's Omotesando strip in fashionable Shibuya Ward.