ETSU EGAMI

One of the most notable artists of the third generation of Japanese postwar contemporary art scene, Etsu Egami investigates the barriers of communication, deploying a plural work spanning from sound and voice recordings, films and painting, bringing the art of portraiture into a completely new dimension. Born in 1994, in Chiba, Japan, and having spent part of her youth in the United States before studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, China and the University of Art and Design (HfG) in Karlsruhe, Germany, her experience of an eternal foreigner became the backbone of an artistic practice at the crossroads of several languages and cultures. From her transitory experiences, she realised that ‘language can only be felt, but not explained’ and that ‘humans communicate with each other, not to get closer, but rather to evaluate their distances’. That fundamental gap has become her path to delve into the nature of the human condition. In the places where her mother tongue is neither spoken nor understood, she came up against the inability to communicate, but she also discovered infinite possibilities. Her anthropological investigation results in a gallery of portraits of individuals that she invites to feel the same state of confusion. In fact, sharing her own experience is a prerequisite to the act of painting.

‘I cherish the faces of people passing by. Although there are more misunderstandings and dislocations, they are (after all) an opportunity and a beginning to understand life and exchange information.’ — Etsu Egami, August 2021