Nana Funo Biography

At first glance, Funo’s works are like elaborately decorative illustrations, with plants, animals and figures that look as if they have come straight from folklore, which blanket her dreamlike pieces.  Revisiting her childhood, Funo often fills up notebooks with her imaginative motifs, drawing for a few hours every day. These drawings then frequently inspire her larger works, which involve using pens, masking fluid, acrylic and oil paints, charcoal, gesso, dye markers and even food colouring in unusual, yet brilliant ways. She exhibits both large (up to 4m) and small paintings (20 x 20 cm) on canvas, all of which are filled with her exquisite motifs.

In 2008, Funo received an M. F. A. in Painting from Kyoto City University of the Arts after studying in the Fine Arts Department of the Osaka University of Art. It was whilst she was in Kyoto that she began drawing in a notebook, and has filled over twenty of them in just five years. Funo mentions that at one point she would be so consumed by painting that she would skip meals, painting up to twenty hours a day. To avoid bad health, she restricts herself to just three to five hours drawing in her notebook in the evening, then goes to her studio and paints until morning.

From visits to museums and childhood memories, Funo uses all kinds of images and objects to inspire her figures, and it is often the spontaneous emotions she feels on a day to day basis that she then draws into her notebooks. Her visits to the museum allow Funo to maintain wide arsenal of imagery and ideas from throughout the history of art. This means she is more sensitive and diverse than most. Funo describes her inspirations as almost floating and temporary, so she needs her notebooks to capture them quickly in ink before they disappear. Speaking on the topic of the trees and forests in her work, Funo explains that they are from the garden of her parents’ house, and from an area near her studio. However, these very real backdrops are reinvented in Funo’s own world into realms of fantasy realised on canvas.

Funo’s style is intense, with layers of patterns and motifs in various mediums that eventually become complex worlds populated by Funo’s imagined creatures and figures. She doesn’t create drafts, and often doesn’t correct her own work, instead often layering paintings with more and more until she achieves her desired composition. Her work is textured, often using masking fluid which is covered in a single colour of acrylic to create the background, then puts a layer of gesso on top to create a stain, followed finally by painted motifs in metallic acrylic paints. The idea for using masking fluid pens came from one of Funo’s seniors at university, and is open to new and interesting materials and techniques to incorporate into her paintings.

There is a sense of narration within Funo’s work, and she does sometimes describe her images as a story. In 2013, Funo discussed a project of a hundred 40”x40” paintings which had a title inspired by Arabian Nights. She imagines her series’ of work as being a collection of scenes from stories she has created, and she approaches painting large canvases as if she were writing a novel. Funo recognises the disjointed nature of her paintings though, and emphasises that they’re like dreams, where the storyline is unclear and many things occur at the same time.

Perhaps dreamlike is the best word to describe Funo’s paintings, as they open up a complex world solely created by Funo. Her work is emotional, intense, magical and on a grand scale, and Funo’s love of painting can be felt with every piece, no matter how large or small it is.

Her recent solo exhibitions include The Fish Glitters as Its Scales Tremble, Tomio Koyama Gallery, (Singapore, 2014); and Vessel That Never Leaks, Tomio Koyama Gallery (Tokyo, 2012); and she has participated major group exhibitions such as The Way of Painting, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (Tokyo, 2014); and VOCA 2009 – The vision of Contemporary Art, The Ueno Royal Museum (Tokyo, 2009). Funo’s work is also in the Japigozzi Collection; Takahashi Collection (Tokyo); Takamatsu City Museum of Art (Kagawa); and the Montblanc GBU Japan collection.