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Tokyo's neon cityscapes recreated with thousands of dot stickers

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Gallery Photo: Yukino Ohmura
Gallery Photo: Yukino Ohmura

The neon lights of Tokyo aren't a subject lacking in artistic representations. That's why Yukino Ohmura came up with a gorgeous, innovative way to render the cityscapes — her stunning works are created using thousands of colored dot stickers that can be bought at any stationery store.

”I believe that night scenes are the most beautiful landscapes, so I have some night view pictures on the wall of my house," Ohmura tells The Verge. "However, my professor at the art university I attended told me that nocturnal themes are actually boring as artwork. Since these stickers are so well-known, I thought that I could make art more accessible to Japanese people by expressing metropolitan nightscapes with these materials, thereby adding a new twist to a genre that has been said to be 'boring.'"

Many of Ohmura's urban landscapes, which are stuck onto black acrylic and take between two to three weeks to complete, will be instantly recognizable to anyone who's visited Tokyo, and the use of ordinary materials adds to the touch of familiarity. "These stickers that I have used in my artwork are very popular in Japan, and almost everyone has used them during elementary school," says Ohmura. "Also, stickers are inexpensive, which I feel creates an interesting contrast by expressing the glamour of the nighttime city through cheap material."

Tokyo sticker artworks by Yukino Ohmura

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All images copyright 2014 Yukino Ohmura. Reproduced with permission.