ART CITIES:Tokyo-Asuka Anastacia Ogawa

Asuka Anastacia Ogawa creates large figurative paintings that depict androgynous children in chimerical dreamscapes, otherworldly scenes formed from solid fields of color and flat picture planes. Her subjects have wide thin eyes that gaze forward, piercing the fourth wall. Ogawa conjures these compositions through an exercise that embraces unmediated impulse and channels the sense of curiosity, wonder and play paramount to childhood.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Blum & Poe Gallery Archive

Asuka Anastacia Ogawa was born in Tokyo where she spent much of her childhood. When she was three years old, Ogawa moved from this vertical urban backdrop to rural Brazil, where she passed a handful of formative early years amongst wandering farm animals and rushing waterfalls. The artist later relocated to Sweden when she was a teen, where she attended high school, and soon thereafter she moved to London to pursue her BFA from Central Saint Martins. The artist now lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. Asuka Anastacia Ogawa presents an exhibition of new paintings. The Japanese-Brazilian artist makes imaginative and fantastical figurative paintings depicting androgynous children. Rendered in flat planes of color, the scenes are centered around dark brown and black figures with narrow eyes. Her subjects are generally draped in floor-length tunics or nothing at all. Most are fashioned with a helmet of close-cropped hair, rendered like swim caps in tones of taupe, caramel, and chocolate. Others wear head coverings. Her subjects have wide thin eyes that gaze forward, piercing the fourth wall. Ogawa conjures these compositions through an exercise that embraces unmediated impulse and channels the sense of curiosity, wonder and play paramount to childhood. In “Medicine girl” (2019), under a deep red sky holding a small orange sun, a child kneels below a string of flags that hang from two posts of swirling pastels. Tinctures in small bottles flank her knees while a stream of gray pours from her pocket in a wide arc that defies gravity into the pale earth below. Another picture, “Lilly” (2019), casts a figure in peach-colored garments clutching a fistful of straw against a solid wall of lilac; her front pocket holds three identical bottles of milky liquid, and a small green alligator drapes across her shoulders. Although Ogawa leaves interpretation of these narratives open to her viewers, symbolically charged imagery such as these point towards mysticism, mythology, and ritual. Ogawa regards her art practice as a deeply personal conduit to a primal place inside, a spiritual channel to her Japanese and Afro-Brazilian ancestral lineage.

Info: Blum & Poe Gallery, Harajuku Jingu-no-mori 5F, 1-14-34 Jingumae, Shibuya, Tokyo, duration: 23/9-7/11/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-16:00 (open by appointment. Schedule your visit here), www.blumandpoe.com