Artemis (27/50)

Artemis — the Greek goddess of the hunt, the moon, and wild nature — rendered in Mayumi Oda's characteristic visual language, her cross-cultural mythological project reaching across from Japanese Buddhist iconography to the Greek pantheon to find another figure of powerful autonomous feminine divinity. Artemis's independence from the male-dominated Olympian order, her domain in the untamed natural world rather than the civilized city, and her role as protector of women in childbirth made her a natural subject for Oda's feminist iconographic project. The synthesis of Japanese printmaking technique with Western mythological subject matter is characteristic of Oda's work.