Japanese self-taught artist Ayako Rokkaku's explosive and dreamlike paintings remind us of the power of a child's imagination.
Read MoreAyako Rokkaku was born in 1982 in Chiba, Japan. She is a self-taught painter, and started creating her work in 2002. The following year, Rokkaku won the Illustration Prize at Kaikai Kiki's Geisai art fair, the biannual Tokyo art fair founded by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. In 2006, she was awarded the prestigious Akio Goto Prize at the same fair.
Since 2003, Rokkaku has risen in international popularity and has held exhibitions in galleries in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Slovakia. Rokkaku's work has been acclaimed in the secondary market and often reaches six-figure prices.
Rokkaku's paintings are recognisable through her intense and vibrant colour palette of pinks, yellows, blues and greens. These explosive rainbow-toned paintings are littered with flowers, illustrations of female characters and cats, imbuing a childlike, dreamy and impressionistic quality.
The female figures in Rokkaku's paintings are stylised, with large eyes and long limbs, mimicking the style of Japanese manga in visuals, tones and expressions. Rokkaku's fascination with young female personas stems from her admiration of the boundlessness of a child's imagination. Often untitled, her paintings have depicted these characters frolicking in fields, resting and dancing.
Apart from these female figures, Rokkaku has also painted abstract scenes, combining various elements and symbols such as arrows, cars and ribbons alongside outbursts of colour.
Rokkaku adopts a unique approach to working on her paintings. Her large-scale canvasses, reaching as wide as 23 feet, are painted entirely with her fingertips. In doing so, Rokkaku's compositions have a certain organic dynamism that separates her work from contemporaries such as Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami.
While its output is two-dimensional, her work has also become performative as she often works in front of an audience without initial plans or sketches, painting purely on intuition. Apart from canvas, Rokkaku has also utilised different materials such as cardboard, acetate and vintage Louis Vuitton suitcases.
Ayako Rokkaku has been widely exhibited internationally. She has held solo exhibitions at Kunsthal Rotterdam; Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Slovakia; and Chiba Prefectural Museum of Art. Her work has been included in the collections of major institutions such as 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Sehwa Museum of Art, Seoul; and Museum Voorlinden, the Netherlands.
Ayako Rokkaku's website can be found here and her Instagram can be found here.
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2022
