INDEPENDENT 20TH CENTURY 2026

The project brings together paintings and sculptures by artists of Asian descent, highlighting the cultural dialogues that shaped postwar informal, lyrical, and calligraphic abstraction, as well as its developments within modern and contemporary practices. The incorporation of references from East Asia contributed to expanding and diversifying the Latin American artistic landscape, which has been profoundly shaped by the experiences of immigrant artists and their descendants.

Since the late nineteenth century, migratory transits from Japan, China, and other East Asian countries have fostered encounters between different visual traditions and local modernisms. These exchanges materialised in various ways—in calligraphic gesture, formal economy, constructive rigour, and approaches to colour and material.

The project brings together artists whose trajectories developed through these experiences of displacement and cultural exchange. Shoko Suzuki is a central figure in the history of artistic ceramics in Brazil, having introduced the noborigama kiln and high-temperature firing to the country; Megumi Yuasa developed a practice that brings together ceramics, philosophy, and politics, while also contributing to the training of artists and the development of contemporary ceramics in Brazil; Massao Okinaka proposed a synthesis between sumi-e and an objective realism informed by Western influences.

Also included are Tomie Ohtake, a central figure in Brazilian abstraction, recognised for her investigation of colour and form; Manabu Mabe, whose work moved from figurative landscape painting towards informal abstraction; Naotoshi Kinoshita, who found in the Brazilian landscape a field through which to bring together references from his Japanese artistic training with a language of formal synthesis and expressive intensity; Alina Okinaka, whose painting, particularly through the still life, investigates relationships between form, colour, and composition through elements of everyday life; and Sachiko Koshikoku, whose abstract work brought together references from Japanese culture and elements drawn from Mesoamerican and Andean visual traditions.

The selection also includes Akinori Nakatani, whose ceramic production incorporated Mesoamerican references and graphic systems associated with Indigenous cultures of the Americas; and Chen Kong Fang, a Chinese-Brazilian painter whose work established connections between Eastern visual traditions and Western painting.

While it is essential to recognise the singularity of different diasporas—each shaped by specific trajectories, tensions, and imaginaries—it is also possible to identify shared experiences. Although the origins of these movements are often associated with wars, persecution, and other macro-political events, their consequences also unfold in everyday life: in the home, language, affections, food, and the relationship with a new territory.

The project thus considers how these experiences of displacement and belonging are inscribed across different artistic languages. By bringing together distinct trajectories and generations, the selection highlights the ways in which artists of Asian descent have participated in the formation and transformation of modern and contemporary art in Brazil.