Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs! Here is an artist who shakes the certainties of our time with great brushstrokes dipped in the complexity of the world. Kei Imazu, born in Yamaguchi in 1980 and settled since 2018 in Bandung, Indonesia, orchestrates a painting that categorically refuses the cozy comfort of decorative art. Her canvases, woven from digital images transformed into oil on linen, constitute a visual laboratory where Malay mythology, colonial archives, and contemporary ecological distress meet.
This woman does not paint; she exhumes. Her studio resembles more that of a digital anthropologist than the romantic lair of an inspired artist. Armed with 3D software, Photoshop, and an insatiable archaeological curiosity, she constructs her compositions as one reconstructs lost civilizations. Each canvas is born from meticulous research: Dutch archival photographs, colonial cartographies, 3D scanned objects from Dutch shipwrecks, Indonesian mythological fragments. This dizzying accumulation of heterogeneous images could collapse into postmodern chaos if Imazu did not possess the rare gift of turning cacophony into symphony.
Archaeology as an artistic method
Imazu’s approach is deeply rooted in an archaeological vision of contemporary creation. Michel Foucault, in The Archaeology of Knowledge [1], developed a method of discourse analysis that sought to uncover the discursive formations underlying statements. Similarly, Kei Imazu practices a visual archaeology that exhumes buried layers of Indonesian history. Her paintings function as excavation sites where traces of the colonial past, pre-colonial myths, and contemporary ecological wounds emerge simultaneously.
This archaeological approach is particularly evident in her recent works devoted to the myth of Hainuwele, the Malay goddess whose dismembered body gives birth to nourishing tubers [2]. Imazu does not merely illustrate this founding story: she superimposes it on Dutch colonial maps, photographs of contemporary mining exploitation, scientific data on deforestation. Each iconographic element operates as an archaeological fragment bearing a specific temporality. The painting thus becomes a testimony where the different eras that shaped the Indonesian archipelago can be read transparently.
The artist works through visual layering, in the manner an archaeologist reads geological layers. Her most accomplished paintings, such as Memories of the Land/Body (2020), exemplify this method. On a surface measuring three meters by six, she superimposes maps of the Gunung Sumbing volcano made by the Dutch geologist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, digital textures evoking human skin, fragments of tropical vegetation, and abstract shapes suggesting internal organs. This layering is not arbitrary: it reveals how colonial cartography has been inscribed into the very flesh of Indonesia, transforming a living territory into an exploitable resource.
The archaeological dimension of her work is accompanied by a reflection on collective memory. Imazu is particularly interested in objects and stories that official history has neglected or obscured. Her research in Dutch archives reveals the extent of this organized amnesia: documents relating to Indonesian history are kept in the Netherlands, written from the colonizers’ point of view. In response to this confiscation of memory, the artist contrasts the richness of the Indonesian oral tradition, these mythological narratives that carry another vision of the world, centered on fertility, regeneration, and harmony with nature. Her paintings then become counter-archives, spaces where silenced voices can finally be heard.
This archaeological approach is extended by Imazu’s use of digital technologies. Far from succumbing to the sirens of spectacular digital art, she employs 3D and image processing software as tools of historical investigation. The digital models she creates from authentic archaeological objects, fragments of Chinese porcelain, precolonial tools, shipwreck remains, allow her to place them back into new narrative contexts. This digital resurrection of lost objects is part of her archaeological approach: to bring back to life what has been buried by history.
Auteur cinema and multiple temporalities
The narrative structure of Kei Imazu’s paintings irresistibly evokes the temporal innovations of contemporary auteur cinema. Like Apichatpong Weerasethakul in his films of the second new wave of Thai cinema, the Japanese artist makes multiple temporalities coexist within the same visual space. Her canvases function according to a logic of cinematic montage where shots overlap rather than follow one another. This technique, which might be called “testimony-painting,” recalls Andrei Tarkovsky’s experiments on the fluid nature of time [3].
In The Sea is Barely Wrinkled (2025), her exhibition at the Museum MACAN in Jakarta, Imazu unfolds a truly cinematic temporality. The central work, which takes its title from Italo Calvino’s novel Palomar, functions like a painted feature film where the wreck of the Batavia in 1629, Javanese mythologies of Nyai Roro Kidul, and climate projections for Jakarta in 2050 intertwine. This temporal layering is not arbitrary: it reveals how colonial violences of the past continue to structure the ecological catastrophes of the present.
The influence of auteur cinema also shows in the way Imazu constructs her compositions. Her paintings do not have a single center but unfold according to a rhizomatic logic where each element resonates with the others. This approach recalls the films of Béla Tarr or Aleksandra Sokurov, those directors who prioritize duration and immersion over dramatic action. Imazu’s canvases require a similar time for contemplation: one must accept getting lost in their visual labyrinths to grasp their profound coherence.
The temporal dimension of her work becomes even more complex with her collaborative installations with Bagus Pandega, notably Artificial Green by Nature Green 4.0 (2024). This piece, presented at the Bangkok Art Biennale, literally functions like a real-time film: a mechanical arm daily draws silhouettes of animals and plants on a canvas painted by Imazu, before a second mechanism erases these drawings with water, in an endless cycle. This mechanism of creation and destruction directly evokes the temporal ellipses of contemplative cinema, those long fixed shots revealing the wear of time on things and beings.
The artist also masters the art of visual flashback. In her series dedicated to the Japanese occupation of Indonesia during the Second World War, she intertwines archival photographs, family testimonies, and her own experiences as a Japanese mother raising her child in Indonesian soil. This memorative superposition technique recalls the films of Chris Marker, notably Sans Soleil, where the present image becomes the receptacle of all past images.
But perhaps it is in her management of pictorial space that Imazu best reveals her affinity with auteur cinema. Her most monumental canvases, like Blossoming Organs (2023), function as tracking shots where the eye can roam without ever exhausting the visual richness. Each area of the canvas has its own narrative density, its own temporal references, its own emotional charges. This multiplicity of centers of interest evokes the films of Robert Altman or Paul Thomas Anderson, those directors who know how to orchestrate narrative complexity without ever descending into confusion.
The influence of auteur cinema is finally manifested in the melancholy that runs through her entire work. Like the films of Wong Kar-wai or Hou Hsiao-hsien, Imazu’s paintings carry within them a nostalgia for a disappearing world. This melancholy is not paralyzing: on the contrary, it feeds a form of poetic resistance against the destructive acceleration of contemporary capitalism.
A crossroads work
The exhibition Tanah Air at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, held earlier this year, confirms Kei Imazu’s artistic maturity. The title, which means “homeland” in Indonesian (literally “land-water”), reveals the ambition of this retrospective: to map the intimate and geopolitical territories that nourish her creation. The artist deploys there her entire plastic vocabulary, from intimate paintings to monumental installations, revealing a remarkable coherence of vision.
Her latest works testify to a radicalization of her approach. The 3D printed sculptures, like SATENE’s Gate (2024), materialize in space the mythological figures that haunt her canvases. These pieces, of spectral whiteness, evoke archaeological remains of the future, fragments of a civilization that would have reconciled technology and spirituality. This expansion towards sculpture confirms that Imazu no longer confines herself to painting the world: she reshapes it according to her vision.
Her installation Bandoengsche Kininefabriek (2024), dedicated to the history of quinine cultivation in Bandung, perfectly illustrates her working method. Starting from a specific historical fact, the colonial exploitation of this antimalarial plant, she weaves a network of connections encompassing the history of tropical medicine, indigenous resistances, and contemporary health issues. This ability to reveal hidden links between seemingly disparate phenomena may be the rarest talent of this artist.
Because Kei Imazu possesses this precious quality: she teaches us to look. Her paintings act as revelations that allow us to perceive the complexity of the contemporary world. In front of her works, usual hierarchies fade away: myth is as valuable as the archive, colonial cartography dialogues with oral tradition, precolonial art resonates with digital technologies. This horizontality of knowledge is undoubtedly one of the most valuable contributions of her work to contemporary art.
The artist’s ecological commitment never amounts to simple activism. Her works devoted to deforestation in Indonesia or to the pollution of the Citarum River reveal rather a deep understanding of the mechanisms linking colonial exploitation and environmental destruction. This ecological awareness is rooted in her intimate knowledge of Indonesian mythologies, these narratives that conceive humans as an integral part of a living cosmos.
Her ability to navigate between the Japanese and Indonesian artistic worlds without ever yielding to the easy shortcuts of exoticism must also be commended. Her status as a foreign resident grants her a privileged observational position, that of someone who both belongs and does not belong, who sees with fresh eyes without remaining at the surface of things. This in-between position nourishes the richness of her perspective and the accuracy of her intuitions.
Kei Imazu ultimately offers us much more than a work of art: she proposes a method for inhabiting the contemporary world. In the face of the informational saturation characterizing our era, she shows that it is possible to create meaning by weaving unexpected links between fragments of reality. Her paintings function as cognitive maps that help us orient ourselves in the chaos of the present. In this, her work follows in the lineage of great creators who, each in their time, knew how to invent new modes of perception of reality.
This artist deserves all our attention. Not only because she brilliantly masters the codes of contemporary art, but because she carries within her a vision of the world that we sorely missed. In an artistic landscape often narcissistic and self-referential, Kei Imazu reminds us that art can still serve a purpose: helping us understand the world and, perhaps, transform it.
- Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Gallimard Editions, 1969
- Adolf E. Jensen, Hainuwele; Folk Tales from the Moluccan Island of Ceram, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1939
- Andrei Tarkovsky, The Sacrament of Time, Éditions de l’Étoile, 1989
