Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Ulala Imai does not paint toys. She paints the Japanese soul at a time when Steiff teddy bears stand alongside Charlie Brown in deafening silence. This forty-three-year-old woman, born in Kanagawa in 1982, transforms everyday objects into true actors in an intimate theatre where, painting after painting, the human comedy of our era is played out. A third-generation artist, daughter of the Western painter Shingo Imai, she has inherited a perspective shaped by European masters while retaining that Japanese sensitivity that makes inert things vibrate.
Hard of hearing from birth, Imai has developed since childhood a particular relationship with the visual world. “I only have images,” she stated in an interview with Bunshun magazine in 2018 [1]. This phrase resonates as an aesthetic as much as an existential creed. Deprived of part of the sound universe, she compensates with remarkable visual acuity that allows her to grasp what we, distracted hearing people, let slip by. Her compositions, meticulously arranged in her living-room studio before being transposed onto canvas, reveal this patience of a wildlife photographer that she claims: “Like a wildlife photographer, I quietly wait for the right tender moment” [2].
Imai’s art is rooted in a Shinto tradition in which every object, living or inanimate, possesses a spiritual essence, a kami. This ancient belief subtly but persistently irrigates her painting. When she places Charlie Brown and Lucy van Pelt side by side on tree branches, she is not content to stage two figurines. She actualizes a cosmogony where the boundaries between subject and object blur, where toys become bearers of a complex interiority. “When I placed them side by side and let them sit on the branches of the trees, they looked into the distance. Sometimes they looked upbeat, sometimes they seemed lost in reminiscence” [3].
This approach finds its roots in Japanese animism, the worldview according to which every object harbors a part of a soul. For Imai, this philosophy is not mere decorative folklore but a genuine artistic method. Her teddy bears, Chewbacca masks, and E.T. dolls are not mere nostalgic props. They embody fragments of collective consciousness, contemporary archetypes produced by our consumer civilization and instinctively recognized by her. The artist animates them with a disturbing inner life, endows them with a presence that surpasses their status as manufactured objects.
This spirituality of the object is enriched by a deep psychoanalytic dimension. For while Imai draws from Shinto animism, she also dialogues with the Freudian unconscious and its mechanisms of projection. Her compositions evoke those moments of childhood when the boundary between real and imaginary disappears, when toys become confidants and witnesses of our first emotions. The uncanny strangeness emanating from her paintings lies in her ability to reactivate in us these archaic layers of the psyche. Her Peanuts figurines, suspended in an unreal foliage, take us back to those secret childhood gardens where we projected our desires and fears onto companions of plastic and fabric.
The artist excels at creating what Freud called das Unheimliche, that unsettling familiarity that arises when the known subtly shifts towards the strange. Her domestic still lifes, white asparagus, buttered toast, cherries on a dish, seem innocuous at first glance. But a detail, a light, a composition destabilizes the gaze and introduces a crack in the obviousness of everyday life. This technique of slight displacement runs through her entire work and gives it that troubled poetry that makes it unique.
When she paints “Coney Island” (2025), showing two bears in bathrobes sitting on a deserted winter beach with a closed amusement park in the background, Imai summons all the melancholy of post-industrial America. These bears are no longer toys but silent witnesses of a recreational utopia in decline. The image functions as an allegory of our contemporary relationship to happiness, always promised, never truly reached, suspended between nostalgia and disenchantment.
Imai’s painting technique, exclusively focused on oil painting, reveals a mastery inherited from the great European masters she admires. She willingly cites Manet, particularly his “Asparagus Bundle” (1880), Van Eyck for his representation of light and transparency, Velázquez for his delicate textures. But she adapts this Western heritage to her Japanese sensibility, creating a strikingly modern hybrid style. Her brushstrokes, quick and sure, seem to capture the fleeting moment when the matter is animated with a life of its own.
This technical virtuosity serves an ambitious aesthetic project: to make visible the invisible that inhabits the visible. Every object she paints becomes a pretext for meditation on presence and absence, on what remains when life has withdrawn from things. Her compositions evoke those suspended moments that immediately follow someone’s departure from a room, when the objects still carry the imprint of that vanished presence.
Imai’s work also questions our contemporary relationship to childhood and memory. A mother of three children, she transforms her family environment into a permanent artistic laboratory. Her living room serves as a studio, her children play around her while she paints. This assumed proximity between art and domestic life nourishes an aesthetics of intimacy that rejects the traditional separation between private space and creative space. “The accidental actions of daily life with nature and family support my creative process” [4], she explains.
This inscription in the family daily life gives her pieces a rare authenticity. When she paints a bear with a missing ear that she names “Vincent van Dog” (2025), she does not delve into autobiographical anecdote but touches the universal of the human condition. This maimed bear becomes a metaphor for our common vulnerability, our lacks that define us as much as our plenitudes.
Imai’s art also reveals a keen understanding of the changes in contemporary popular culture. Her references to Star Wars, the Peanuts, and Sesame Street do not serve as mere decorative citations but as an archaeology of the present. These icons of American pop culture, assimilated by Japanese society and reinterpreted through the eyes of a hard-of-hearing artist, undergo a triple cultural translation that greatly enriches their original meaning.
This ability to create a dialogue between East and West, tradition and modernity, silence and communication places Imai in a line of Japanese artists who, since Hokusai, have known how to draw from the national heritage while opening themselves to external influences. But unlike many of her contemporaries who lean towards the spectacular or conceptual, she maintains an unwavering fidelity to painting as her preferred means of expression.
Her palette, dominated by soft and luminous tones, evokes that particular quality of Japanese light that Japanese photographers and filmmakers have known how to magnify. But Imai never falls into decorative aestheticism. Her compositions, though apparently simple, hide a remarkable narrative complexity. Every element is weighted, every power relationship calculated to create these effects of meaning that enrich her universe.
The exhibition “CALM” presented in early 2025 at the Karma gallery in New York confirms Imai’s artistic maturity. The assembled works testify to a stylistic evolution towards greater breadth and monumentality without losing any of the intimacy that defines her signature. Her recent large formats, such as “Lovers” (2025), which depicts Charlie Brown and Lucy at an almost human scale, reveal her ability to play with scale effects to intensify the emotional impact of her compositions.
This constant search for the right emotion, without pathos or sentimentality, perhaps constitutes Imai’s greatest achievement. In a world saturated with images and noise, she proposes an art of silence and contemplation that resonates with a special force. Her canvases function as bubbles of tranquility in contemporary chaos, spaces of meditation where the gaze can finally rest and take the time to truly see.
The art of Ulala Imai reminds us that great painting does not need grand subjects to touch the essential. A buttered toast, a teddy bear, cartoon figurines can suffice to reveal the mysteries of human existence, provided they are looked at with the particular intensity that sensory deprivation transformed into artistic gift provides. In this, this remarkable woman honors the finest tradition of painting: transforming the banal into the sublime, revealing the extraordinary that lies dormant in the ordinary, giving us to see what we did not know how to see.
- Bunshun Magazine, interview 2018, quoted in Yokogao Magazine, “Domestic Meditations – The Softly Glowing World of Ulala Imai”, January 2025
- Yokogao Magazine, “Domestic Meditations – The Softly Glowing World of Ulala Imai”, by Sam Siegel, January 2025
- Aspen Art Museum, interview with Terence Trouillot, 2023
- Yokogao Magazine, “Domestic Meditations – The Softly Glowing World of Ulala Imai”, by Sam Siegel, January 2025
