Tomoko Kashiki

Tomoko Kashiki’s figures often appear as fragments, situated within confined settings such as interiors or gardens. The presence that emanates from these figures seems to be sealed within the very surface of the painting.

At first glance, her paintings recall the smooth textures and flowing lines of traditional nihonga, yet they are entirely executed in acrylic. Kashiki repeatedly paints and then sands down her canvases before painting again, building up delicate layers of pigment that form her distinctive pictorial space: a luminous surface backed by strata of color. Her style evokes Heian Buddhist painting as well as the elegant bijinga of modern masters such as Uemura Shōen, a connection that resonates with her upbringing and training in Kyoto.

As the artist herself has remarked, “The beginning of a painting is my own image, and the goal is how close I can get to it.” Her practice unfolds like the fermentation of accumulated visions, in which motifs and expressions are added, adjusted, and layered against the “goal” in her mind. Through this ongoing process, she constructs intricately superimposed layers.

The resulting smooth surfaces are deliberately finished to exclude the traces of time and the artist’s hand. What emerges are not narrative scenes, but images that exist solely in the imagination. In this way, everyday sights undergo a subtle transformation during the process of painting, eventually sublimating into works that leave the viewer with the vivid intensity of a waking dream.

Kashiki’s paintings capture delicate intersections of memory and sensation. While drawing upon the lineage of bodily representation and landscape depiction in East Asia, her work proposes a mode of contemplative imagination unique to contemporary painting.

Biography

1982　Born in Kyoto, Japan
2011　Received PhD, Kyoto City University of Arts
Lives and works in Kyoto

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2024　Tomoko Kashiki, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo & Shanghai
2020　Some of the Many Things That I Want to Remember, Ota Fine Arts, Singapore
2016　Aperto 05 Tomoko Kashiki: Daydream, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
2015　Tomoko Kashiki, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris

Selected Group Exhibitions
2023　Body, Love, Gender, Gana Art Center, Seoul
2015　The Takahashi Collection: Mirror Neuron, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery
2012　The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
2011　Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama
2011　Bye Bye Kitty!!!, Japan Society, New York

Selected Collections
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Tasmania
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane
The National Museum of Art, Osaka
Toyota Art Collection
Dai-ichi Life Insurance Company