After having collaborated with artist Aki Kuroda, the Aquarium de Paris has chosen to entrust its new artistic journey to the young artist: Maki Ohkojima, : "L'œil de la Baleine". With this, its tenth carte blanche, the Aquarium de Paris is helping to illustrate the difference in approach between two generations of the Japanese scene, each with different backgrounds and experiences. Through "The Eye of the Whale", a giant 300-square-metre fresco, Maki Ohkojima expresses her commitment to the preservation of seas and oceans. Born in Higashikurume, a town in the Tokyo region renowned for the quality of its rivers and springs, the artist sees the Earth as a vast ocean. Water, an essential element of life from the womb onwards, is "the soup of life" where creatures form over thousands of years.

To draw the ocean is to draw life. It was Maki Ohkojima's singular ecological sensibility that led our partner, the Tara Expeditions Foundation, to select her project from among many candidates for an artist's residency aboard the Tara Pacific 2016-2018 expedition. Maki was able to spend a month aboard the scientific schooner Tara, during its explorations in Japanese waters.