Arisa
Kumagai

Confronting her own complex origins and challenging circumstances, Arisa Kumagai uses painting as a means to express the contradictions and conflicts therein. But while her works may be grounded in intensely personal experiences, the opposing yet inextricably linked emotions and conditions—life and death, love and hate, affluence and poverty—that permeate them elicit powerful emotions from the viewer too, as universal concerns serving as a microcosm of human society.

Kumagai was born into a family that during Japan’s booming bubble period owned a boutique dealing in high-end Italian fashion, situated near Osaka’s old red-light district. Leisure Class an ongoing project since her student days, shows the artist’s grandfather wearing the expensive silk shirts that were fashionable at the time. These garments crafted from lustrous, luxurious patterned fabrics, contrast wonderfully with the deep wrinkles on the old man’s skin, and his hunched back. The title “Leisure Class” refers to those who consciously court the envy of those around them by engaging in conspicuous consumption, and the vibrant hues and chiaroscuro on the canvas seem to illuminate the disconnect between style and substance that underlies such craving for attention.

Single bed (2018), unveiled at Kumagai’s first solo show at Gallery Koyanagi, in 2019, depicts life-like flowers against a deep dark background of layered transparent color. This work originating in the artist’s personal experience of finding herself alone in bed, paralyzed with shock on learning of the lonely death of an estranged father more feared than loved, is painted on a long vertical canvas the same size as a single bed. Kumagai’s flowers are invariably given or offered by someone to or for someone, and encapsulate a range of emotions from the pain of separation, to celebration, but here the blooms made as an offering by the artist’s mother on her father’s death adorn the canvas in a manner almost inappropriately exuberant, and certainly cold; a vivid reflection perhaps of the inexpressible depth of love and loathing between the couple. The series JORDAN (Old Kids Shoes) meanwhile, depicts the sneakers that Kumagai’s violent father bought for her as a frequent gift. Though the special item gifted unasked may suggest a warped kind of love, the desperate belief in that love all the same is here again expressed with consummate skill.

In recent years Kumagai has been studying the various ways faith is displayed in Catholic churches, and fundamental human behaviors and psychology, including around sin and atonement. Encountering along the way the beauty and power so profoundly entwined in religion, and aspects such as violence and prayer, has prompted in her painted expression a deeper pursuit of these aspects of human behavior that mirror her own family experience. Kumagai’s first work on a religious theme, she (2022) portrays the praying hands of an angel seen at a church in New York, in a painting featuring her characteristic shading and boldly cropped composition. For the exhibition “My yearning to be You” (Gallery Koyanagi), verses penned by the artist were displayed alongside the works. Words and inquiries to fire the imagination intersect with the spectator’s own memories and experience, encouraging insights, empathy, and by extension self-disclosure and catharsis; an effect that could be described as the quintessence of Kumagai’s creative practice.