Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. A new star has risen in the Japanese artistic firmament, and it does not emerge from the virtual void of your stock market speculations. Emi Kuraya, born in 1995 in Kanagawa, embodies this new generation of Japanese artists who transform the cultural legacy of manga into a visceral contemporary pictorial experience.
In a Japan where social isolation has become a more virulent epidemic than Covid-19, Kuraya paints teenage girls floating between two worlds. Her heroines, frozen in a suspended moment, gaze at the viewer with an intensity reminiscent of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s portraits. This reference is no accident: like the German Renaissance master who painted his Venuses with a troubling mix of innocence and sensuality, Kuraya captures her young models in a temporal in-between, between vanishing childhood and looming adulthood.
Kuraya’s technique is as unique as her vision. On a Gesso base that gives the canvas its primal roughness, she applies oil paint in layers so thin they seem to have been laid down by the breath of the wind. She then dabs the material with tissues, creating an ethereal texture that evokes watercolor more than traditional oil painting. This technical approach echoes the Japanese philosophy of Mono No Aware, the poignant awareness of the impermanence of things.
Take “Flying Dog and Girl” (2023): a young girl and a dog levitate above a banal urban landscape. This work is not just a simple manga fantasy transposed onto canvas. It perfectly illustrates the Japanese philosophical concept of “ma”, that spatiotemporal interval that is neither here nor there, neither present nor absent. Kuraya’s floating characters inhabit this liminal space, as if suspended between earthly gravity and celestial pull.
Contemporary Japanese society, with its stifling social rigidity and crushing expectations on youth, is reflected in every painting. Kuraya’s girls, with their pristine school uniforms and enigmatic gazes, embody what philosopher Roland Barthes called the “degree zero of writing” in his analysis of Japanese culture. They are there before us, but their very presence is a form of absence, a silent commentary on social alienation in the Japanese archipelago.
Consider “Ferris Wheel: Girl” (2023), where a young girl sits in a Ferris wheel cabin. The framing, seemingly simple, reveals dizzying complexity: the capsule, suspended between sky and earth, becomes a metaphor for contemporary Japanese adolescence, trapped between ancestral traditions and devouring modernity. This work directly dialogues with Martin Heidegger’s philosophical concept of “being-in-between”, the existential condition of being suspended between different possibilities of existence.
The artist, who joined Takashi Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki collective in 2018 while still a student at Tama Art University in Tokyo, does not merely recycle manga codes. She transcends them to create a unique pictorial language where Japanese pop culture meets the grand tradition of Western oil painting. Her female characters, inspired as much by close friends as by strangers on the street or anime heroines, become the actresses of a social theater where the silent drama of Japanese youth is played out.
The urban landscapes serving as backdrops for her compositions are never chosen at random. These are places she knows intimately in Kanagawa Prefecture, transformed by her vision into quasi-metaphysical scenes. Empty parking lots, anonymous residential streets, mundane supermarkets become, under her brush, transitional spaces where the most prosaic everyday life tilts into the strange.
Take the way Kuraya uses light: her pale skies, metallic reflections on urban furniture, and soft shadows create an atmosphere evoking ukiyo-e, the “floating world pictures” of the Edo period. But where the masters of Japanese woodblock prints depicted the ephemeral pleasures of entertainment districts, Kuraya captures the diffuse melancholy of a generation seeking its place in a perpetually changing Japan.
This tension between tradition and modernity, between reality and imagination, between gravity and weightlessness, makes Kuraya’s work a subtle commentary on the feminine condition in 21st-century Japan. Her silent heroines, with their large expressive eyes and frozen poses, become the mute spokespersons of a generation suffocating under the weight of social conventions while dreaming of flight.
Kuraya’s work transcends the simple dialogue between manga and Western painting to reach a universal dimension. Her characters, though anchored in contemporary Japanese reality, touch on something deeper: that transitional period where identity crystallizes, where the certainties of childhood dissolve in the face of adulthood’s ambiguities.
Her chromatic palette, dominated by pastel tones that seem washed by rain, recalls the misty atmospheres of William Turner’s paintings. But where the English master sought to capture nature’s changing moods, Kuraya paints the subtle variations of adolescent emotions, this inner meteorology as unstable as stormy skies.
In her latest works, such as those exhibited in Hong Kong in 2024, the artist pushes her exploration of contemporary feminine identity further. The figures she paints are no longer mere manga archetypes but become the actresses of a broader reflection on self-construction in a hyper-connected society. Her characters, often captured in moments of contemplative solitude, embody what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity”, the contemporary condition where identities are fluid, constantly negotiated between the real and the virtual.
Kuraya transforms everyday scenes into moments of visual epiphany. A parking lot becomes a metaphysical theater, a banal street metamorphoses into a stage where a silent drama unfolds, a supermarket changes into a liminal space where time seems suspended. This transfiguration of the banal recalls the approach of Italian metaphysical painters like Giorgio de Chirico but without their existential pessimism.
At just 29 years old, Emi Kuraya has already developed a distinctive artistic voice that resonates far beyond Japan’s borders. Her exhibitions at the Perrotin Gallery, from Paris to Shanghai to Seoul, demonstrate that her art strikes a universal chord. In a world where adolescence stretches further and identity becomes increasingly fluid, her paintings capture something essential about the contemporary human condition.
The artist does not merely paint portraits; she creates windows into the interiority of her subjects. Her characters gaze at us with an intensity that forces us to question our own relationship to time, space, and identity. In an era obsessed with speed and performance, her paintings invite us to a contemplative pause, a moment of suspension where time itself seems to hold its breath.
Kuraya’s early success might raise fears of complacency, but each new exhibition reveals an artist in constant evolution. Her technique sharpens, her vision deepens, and her exploration of the boundaries between reality and fiction grows increasingly sophisticated. She perfectly embodies this new generation of Japanese artists who, while rooted in a millennia-old tradition, manage to create a resolutely contemporary visual language.
In an often cynical and disenchanted art world, Kuraya reminds us that painting can still move us, make us dream, and make us think. Her paintings are visual poems that speak of solitude and connection, alienation and hope, gravity and flight. And perhaps that is her greatest talent: making us feel, through her suspended characters, that we too can rise above the gravity of the everyday.