From next January 10 until April 26, 2020, at the USC Pacific Asia Museum in California, not far from Los Angeles, it will be possible to visit the exhibition of Oscar Oiwa, a Japanese but naturalized Brazilian artist. The exhibition is entitled “Dreams of a Sleeping World” and is a large and complex work, carefully created by hand over two weeks. It was designed by Oiwa together with his assistant and four MFA students from the USC Roski School of Fine Art, using about 120 markers.

What is represented in Dreams of a Sleeping World is a dream landscape that tells a bit about this world and is made with black ink inside a white nylon dome. This was made to measure and covers almost 800 square meters.

Visitors entering the dome of the museum have the opportunity to immerse themselves in otherworldly images, including Oiwa’s signature, the swirling cloud and the shapes of the earth. The dreamlike landscape thus allows visitors to contemplate the chaos of the outside world and all its complexities and then, through an introspective journey, find peace.

Coming out of the dome, people will find a suite of colorful and surreal landscape paintings, also by Oscar Oiwa, which includes fantastic images that address the transformation of the environment. The artist’s large-scale paintings, depicting landscapes of cities and forests, defy the laws of physics and serve as allegories about existential threats to the world where animals and ghosts swim in the skies.

Photo credit: courtesy USC Pacific Asia Museum and Oscar Oiwa studio