asuka anastacia ogawa

Born in Japan, Ogawa spent part of her childhood and adolescence in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, the hometown of her maternal family. Later, the artist completed her studies in Sweden and graduated from Central Saint Martins College in London, and currently lives in Los Angeles, in the United States. The cultural diversity that permeated her formative years had a significant impact on her artistic production, which incorporates different visual references, beliefs, and traditions.

Even amidst so many transits, her work focuses precisely on her two starting points: Japan and Brazil. Her scenes, constructed through saturated colors, intense luminosity, and neutral backgrounds, present characters and elements grouped in the foreground, combining contrasting tones in direct compositions. The abstract and flat backgrounds of the scenes seem to situate them in a timeless, dreamlike, and fantastic universe, and although interactions may exist between characters and other elements, they are quite subtle, insinuating more than revealing in silent atmospheres.

Asuka populates her compositions with androgynous figures with carefully constructed faces and almond-shaped eyes that seem to gaze beyond the limits of the canvas. When they interact with each other, the emphasis falls on the exchanges of glances. The serenity and silence that transpire in the compositions have a strong connection to the artist's process of deepening in meditative and spiritual practices.

In Listening, a character leans against a tree and tilts her head to the left, as if listening to something the tree has to teach. From it, mysterious beings or specters seem to emerge. These same specters reappear in Kaori. In this work, two characters appear very close: while the woman is lying down, the man is kneeling, holding a small element that seems to shoot out a jet of white color, which ends up dividing the composition. From the heads of both emerge specters or entities, which seem to go towards each other.

The images portrayed by Ogawa primarily refer to her Japanese and Afro-Brazilian ancestry. "Although I don't have a theme when I paint, I'm always thinking about my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, and the beauty, strength, struggle, and love of our ancestors," said the artist on the occasion of her first exhibition in Brazil, at Nara Roesler São Paulo, in 2024.

The influence of ancestral legacy in Ogawa's production is visible not only through the various elements and details present in her paintings, such as clothing, accessories, objects, and animals carefully inserted into her compositions, but also through the representation of everyday situations and themes related to affection, creating ambiguous and mysterious works loaded with symbolism that connect her to her diverse roots.