Emmy
Asakura

Emmy Asakura (1962) is a Belgian artist born in Kortrijk with mixed genes from Japan and Flanders. In her paintings and installations she mainly gives form to feminine topics along with her own personal experiences. For Emmy Asakura, painting is a process of an intuitive quest for an image that by definition is never finished. Her play of colours and the composition of her images are a testimony of that lived-through search. Asakura recalls in her painterly work an abstract-expressionist style, whilst combining the abstract with the figurative. The creation of a painting is a physical, gestural event. Just as in Japanese print art, she expresses herself with abundant colour. Her method is also a process of continuous assembly. Canvas is treated with layers of paint. She constantly constructs and deconstructs her canvas by painting over and removing layers in their turn, which gives her work a fragile texture and artistic idiom.Asakura likes to experiment with different materials. She thus adds layers of Japanese print motifs to a large number of works. Her painterly work is one endless palimpsest – a dynamic and complex field of assembled significance that not easily reveal itself. Her universe of images is a set-up of mainly oil painting with paper, cloth, fabric or photographs. The beholder is invited to keep looking and to find figurative starting points in this layering. Her expatriate life, the figure of the Virgin Mary and her world of personal secrets are just a few examples of the recurrent themes in her body of work. Emmy Asakura’s works are autobiographical. Her inspiration comes from her everyday life as a woman. Encounters, photos, books, smells, dance movements,…play a huge role in her artistic process. She considers her dual identity by being half-and-half as a blessing and a resource. It creates friction and inner turmoil that she translates into her work.In addition to the paintings, she also comments on the mother figure by creating mixed media installations. As she merges aspects of the virgin mother and the temptress in her Femmina installation by using prayer cards with Mary’s iconography on a nude Venus, she makes an interesting statement about the female identity in the #metoo culture. By making a clear reference to archetypal women, she investigates our contemporary perspective on the female chastity and sexuality.Emmy Asakura started her professional career as an artist at a later, mature age. Along with a passion and talent for dance performance and visual arts from her youngest age, she started her career by obtaining a Master degree of Arts in Oriental Languages at the University of Ghent. After her graduation, she went to live and work in Osaka, Japan for a year and later, she lands in Brussels as a journalist with Kyodo News Service and VRT (Belgian Dutch Language State Radio and TV), while also teaching Japanese at VUB (University in Brussels). Then starts a long spell of expatriate life, first in Switzerland, then the U.S. and finally in Italy, before returning to Belgium in 2009. It is abroad that her career as a painter takes off. Private courses in Switzerland, and Studies at the Birmingham Bloomfield Hills Art Center in Michigan, the Scuola d’Arte in Monza are followed by a full curriculum at the Academy of Visual Arts in Overijse and the Academy in Mechelen, Belgium. Personal childhood memories, an oriental background, being a woman/mother and many experiences abroad have nourished and underlie all of her art works. But although autobiographical inspired, Emmy Asakura has the mature ability to convincingly transcend in her art the merely individual to express the universal.ExhibitionsFrom 2014 until 2018 she has exhibited her recent paintings in the Husk gallery space in her home town Tervuren, nearby Brussels where she also works in her own studio. In June 2018 her first curated solo show ‘The subcutaneous desire’ took place at the art fair booth in Tour & Taxis, Brussels. The exhibition was curated by Ingrid Van Hecke, an art historian of KU Leuven University and accompanied by a recently published artist’s monograph dedicated to her latest art works: Recently, her monumental painting Between Countries was selected by a jury of art collectors and museum directors for the #ongezien3 exhibition in Antwerp, Belgium ( august - september 2018 ) which was launched at the annual Museum night.The artist is preparing an upcoming solo exhibition in the Gasthuiskapel, a former chapel in Borgloon, Belgium (August 2019). Publication‘Emmy Asakura. The Subcutaneous Desire’, artist monograph edited by Husk Gallery with texts by Ingrid Van Hecke, Tervuren, 2018, 46p. ISBN 9789082862409