Public and me

The 2022 lithograph pairs civic and personal registers, a tension running through Ashikawa's body of work. The composition likely sets a diminutive figure within an expansive public setting — plaza, station, overpass, or other piece of urban infrastructure — with the manga-derived figural register operating against architectural scale. Lithography's planographic surface permits Ashikawa to hold civil-engineering geometry (handrails, bollards, paving grids, signage) in continuous tonal range alongside the figure's reduced graphic shorthand. Tusche washes and autographic crayon work give the print its drawn rather than reproductive quality. The work sits within the body produced after Ashikawa's 2019 MFA at Musashino Art University, when the architectural-scale lithograph addressing public space consolidated as her signature mode. The title's first-person framing — 'me' alongside 'public' — places the artist as observer-inhabitant rather than detached chronicler of the engineered landscape.