Tiger Punch is a series of paintings and installations drawn from her personal lexicon of mythologized Americana and playful sense of humor. Inspired by iconic pop cultural phenomena such as the Beatles, R2D2, and ET, Misaki Kawai incorporates these characters into surreal dream worlds of keyed up color and joyous irreverence. In them, extraterrestrial chickens do experiments in vast underground laboratories and haphazardly constructed boats ride tsunami-sized waves, manned by crews of robots and octopi. Often, the artist’s own face will appear alongside John Lennon’s or C3P0’s, piloting a futuristic spaceship or outsized airliner.

Cobbled together from everyday materials like cardboard and cotton balls, Kawai’s work pairs a deliberately handmade aesthetic with off-kilter proportions. Paintings are stuck with bits of yarn and fabric strips, sculptures glued with tiny toys found in Chinatown dollar stores. At the same time, Kawai remains attentive to the work’s formal arrangement, each gesture thoroughly considered, revealing an intuitive and sophisticated sense of space. This craft-conscious practice and careful attention to detail suffuses the work with sincerity, lending authenticity to the visual pleasure of Kawai’s compositions.