Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: it’s time to talk about Ayako Rokkaku (born in 1982 in Chiba, Japan), the artist shaking up Asian auction houses with her acrylic paint-covered fingers.
While artistic gestures are often calculated, and every brushstroke over-theorized to exhaustion by curators in black suits sipping lukewarm champagne, Rokkaku steps in barefoot, hands covered in paint, throwing her visceral vision of creation in the face of the art market. She paints directly with her fingers, without preliminary sketches, as if to say: “Your theories about art? I wash my hands of them—with acrylic paint.”
The first defining feature of her work is this physical, almost primitive approach to painting. She doesn’t use brushes—perhaps too bourgeois, too conventional. No, she dives her hands directly into the paint, like a child discovering the tactile joy of creation. This method recalls Jackson Pollock’s action painting, except here there’s no masculine mystification à la Greenberg. Rokkaku turns the act of painting into a performance where her entire body participates in creation. It’s Yves Klein without the blue, Ana Mendieta without the blood—a form of body art that leaves colorful marks rather than dramatic imprints.
This corporeal approach to painting echoes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy. In The Eye and the Mind (1964), he wrote: “The painter brings his body… It is by lending his body to the world that the painter changes the world into painting”. Rokkaku literally embodies this idea. Her fingers become direct extensions of her creative consciousness, erasing the traditional distance between the artist and their work imposed by the brush. It’s a return to what Walter Benjamin called the tactile experience of art, before mechanical reproduction sterilized everything.
The second defining feature of her work lies in her unique visual universe, populated by female figures with oversized eyes and elongated limbs, floating in abstract spaces filled with bright colors. These characters, often described as kawaii (cute in Japanese), are in fact much more complex. They carry an uncanny quality that would have thrilled Freud. These girls with sometimes vacant, sometimes accusatory gazes inhabit a world where innocence coexists with existential unease.
Her creations evoke what Gaston Bachelard described in The Poetics of Reverie (1960) as “cosmic childhood”—a state where the boundaries between reality and imagination dissolve. But unlike traditional depictions of childhood, Rokkaku’s characters are not merely cute or comforting. They possess a troubling ambiguity, closer to Hans Bellmer’s uncanny dolls than to commercial manga characters.
This duality between apparent naivety and underlying complexity makes Rokkaku especially relevant in our era of tensions between authenticity and artificiality. Her works have become so sought after that her canvases now sell for hundreds of thousands of euros, making her the sixth most valuable Japanese artist of all time. Not bad for someone who started painting on cardboard salvaged from Tokyo parks.
Her commercial success could be seen as a betrayal of her initial spontaneity. But Rokkaku maintains remarkable integrity in her practice. Whether painting on a seven-meter canvas or a piece of cardboard, she retains the same direct, physical, almost primitive approach to creation. She continues her live painting performances, transforming the creative act into a public spectacle, demystifying the artistic process while theatricalizing it.
Her recent work has expanded to include sculpture, notably in bronze and glass, proving that her magical fingers can shape any material. These three-dimensional pieces carry the same tension between kawaii and uncanny, spontaneity and permanence. Her glass sculptures, created in Murano, are particularly fascinating—as if her painted characters suddenly took form in the real world, frozen in their momentum by molten glass.
Rokkaku’s journey is a slap in the face to anyone who thinks art must be conceptual, distant, and intellectualized today. She proves it’s still possible to create visceral, direct, emotionally charged art without falling into complacency or triviality. Her growing success, particularly in Asia where her works reach record prices, shows that there’s still an audience for art that speaks to the heart as much as the mind. Rokkaku reminds us that creation can still be an act of pure joy, discovery, and unrestrained exploration. She is living proof that innocence, when carried by a strong artistic vision and undeniable technical skill, can be a revolutionary force.
Her works remind us of Paul Klee’s words in The Theory of Modern Art: “Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible”. Rokkaku makes visible an inner world where joy and unease, innocence and awareness, spontaneity and mastery coexist in a precarious and fascinating balance. She invites us to plunge our own hands into the material of our dreams, to rediscover the creative freedom we all knew as children before the world taught us to stay clean and orderly.
She has become a pivotal figure on the contemporary scene, exhibiting in prestigious institutions like the Long Museum in Shanghai and the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. Remarkably, she has managed to maintain the essence of her artistic approach despite commercial success. She continues to paint with her hands, perform live, and push the boundaries of her art while remaining true to her original vision.
If some critics view her work as merely an extension of Japanese kawaii culture, it’s because they haven’t looked closely enough. Her works are imbued with constant tension between charm and unease, spontaneity and control, childlike innocence and profound adulthood. This complexity is precisely what makes her art something more than just an expression of Japanese pop culture.
Her journey is all the more remarkable because she is self-taught. While diplomas from elite schools often serve as a ticket, she has made her mark through sheer vision and practice. She could almost embody what Dubuffet sought in Art Brut: creation free from cultural conditioning, even though, paradoxically, her work is deeply rooted in contemporary visual culture.
Rokkaku moves between Berlin, Porto, and Tokyo, creating art that transcends cultural boundaries while remaining deeply personal. She represents a new generation of global artists drawing from their cultural roots while crafting a universal visual language. Her growing success reflects a thirst for sincerity and authenticity in an intellectual field often dominated by posturing.
It is fascinating to see how she has transformed what could have been merely an original technique—painting with fingers—into a genuine artistic signature. This tactile approach to painting is a philosophy of creation placing the body and instinct at the center of the artistic process. Rokkaku reminds us that art can still be a direct, visceral, emotionally charged experience. She proves that simplicity is not the enemy of depth and that spontaneity can coexist with technical mastery.
Her commercial success might be seen as a form of co-opting by the art market, but it also testifies to a genuine hunger for art that speaks directly to emotions, requiring no pages of critical theory to be appreciated. In our overly hermetic and elitist art world, she is a breath of fresh air.