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Poor Little Dears: The Sinister and Mysterious Childhood Depictions of Hikari Shimoda

Hikari Shimoda’s creepy paintings of children are simultaneously sweet and uncanny. The eerie mouths, asymmetrical, strange little faces and one-eyed appearance (often one milky eye, one bruised and bloody-looking) of these alien but painfully familiar little beings, rendered in bright or pastel, almost child-friendly, but also quite subtly mixed and delicate, colors, all serve to give an unsettling sense of the corruption of innocence, an inversion of the saccharine bliss associated with little children.

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