Japanese Artist Ulala Imai Turns Her Youngsters’ Toys into Cuddly Work

In a quiet residential pocket of Japan’s Kanagawa Prefecture, about an hour southwest of Tokyo, Japanese painter Ulala Imai lives surrounded by structure that evokes her previous. She shares a newly constructed, tiered, and spacious dwelling—elegant, minimalist, ethereal, and flooded with gentle white gentle—along with her husband and kids. However simply throughout the road stands the three-story dwelling the place she grew up, initially a U.S. army home bought and redesigned by her father, Shingo Imai, a Western-style painter. Diagonally throughout is one other single-story home the place she and her household lived till final November—her dwelling and studio for 9 years. A lot of her latest work was painted in its lounge, typically along with her youngsters enjoying beside her.

Subsequent door to her present house is one other constructing woven into her private historical past: a tiny weathered home which her father rented as a younger man, the place Imai additionally spent a part of her childhood. In the present day, that constructing serves as Imai’s studio. The area hums quietly with massive canvases in numerous phases, and is adorned with portray tools and on a regular basis objects from her life, which she typically portrays in her artwork. Some of the acclaimed figurative painters in Japan right this moment, Imai’s worldwide visibility is now rising—with works not too long ago proven at Karma in New York and Artwork Basel Hong Kong, and others held in main collections together with these at SFMOMA and the Dallas Museum of Artwork. On the similar time, her internal world stays tightly rooted in dwelling. The upcoming exhibition “CLOSE” at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, on view Could fifteenth via July twelfth, continues that trajectory, weaving in references to Shinto spirituality and childhood objects, household, care, and presence.

Imai’s rise, nevertheless, has been slow-burning. A graduate of the distinguished Tama Artwork College, she exhibited for years in Japan earlier than gaining worldwide momentum, which began at Paris Internationale in 2017, the place she confirmed small work of buttered toast and fruit at Union Pacific’s sales space. Her 2021 worldwide solo debut exhibition, “AMAZING,” at Nonaka-Hill in Los Angeles coincided with the pandemic—a time she describes as creatively formative. Confined to the house that additionally served as her studio, she started to make work with what was instantly at hand. That inward-looking interval, she stated, helped form her fashion and gave her the braveness to pursue alternatives overseas.

In her Kanagawa studio, there’s a life-sized toy canine with just one ear—extremely symbolic, given Imai’s listening to impairment—which is the topic of one in all her new work. On one wall hangs a portray by her father. Imai is a third-generation artist, raised in a richly visible family, now married to up to date painter Yu Nishimura (not too long ago added to the roster of David Zwirner). For this inventive couple, artwork is each heritage and residing observe.

On this geographically tight, emotionally expansive stomping floor, Imai has carved out a singularly intimate observe. “A lot of the motifs in my work come from my day by day life inside a small, one-and-a-half-kilometer radius. These are acquainted scenes and objects,” she stated. It’s a sensation she evokes in her present exhibition title “CLOSE”: “Whereas it may recall to mind the picture of a retailer closing, it holds a way of heat and intimacy for me.”

In her work, toys, meals, family objects, and on a regular basis rituals turn out to be the central actors in work that float between the true and the uncanny. To understand Imai’s work is certainly to expertise a type of visible hush, rooted in how she perceives the world. “I used to be born with listening to loss,” she defined. “Due to that, I’ve no actual sense of what sound is like for these with full listening to. Listening to aids are important for me, however the digitally transformed world they provide typically feels pretend. I’ve discovered it onerous to belief—so I’ve come to rely much more on the visible world.”

Imai’s listening to impairment shapes her relationship to visible rhythm. “Even in silence, once I encounter a second that strikes me deeply, it resonates like a melody inside me,” she says. “I don’t know the textbook definition of melody, but when my work can evoke a forgotten tune in somebody’s coronary heart, that makes me very pleased.”

This reliance on imaginative and prescient isn’t simply sensible; it’s poetic. Her work typically evoke the stillness of a room simply after somebody has left. They’re composed via a meticulous means of real-world association—arranging scenes each inside and outdoors her dwelling earlier than translating them into paint on canvas. The outcomes are each luminous and elusive: home scenes rendered with the psychological resonance of fantasy. “I wish to paint one thing like a flickering candle,” she says, “which has no sound, however nonetheless strikes and comforts the center.”

That duality—stillness with an emotional undercurrent—runs all through “CLOSE.” One portray, LOVERS (2025), is a large-scale work that includes Charlie Brown and Lucy (from the sketch “Peanuts”) collectible figurines perched in a tree simply past her window. Later, I noticed the precise toys resting on a shelf in her spacious, open-plan lounge. “The figures are stretched so massive that they really feel very near the viewer,” Imai stated. “However there’s a clear boundary. They’re in a world of their very own, wrapped within the shade of the tree.” The figures’ gaze is gentle and shared, angled upward in the identical path.

“We stay in an period crammed with contradictions and overwhelming info, the place uncertainty is fixed,” she continued. “In such instances, I wish to proceed portray in a approach that communicates my emotions as truthfully and clearly as attainable—to precise one thing easy and heartfelt, one thing that resonates straight with the viewer.”

Motherhood additionally reshaped her method to art-making. “After my first baby was born, I used to be making an attempt to determine the right way to maintain creating whereas caring for a child,” she recalled. “Throughout naps, I’d collect no matter objects I had round me—child dolls, scallions from the fridge, a glass of grape juice—and begin establishing nonetheless lifes on the eating desk. Typically I’d even stick an Ultraman determine right into a potato,” she stated, referring to the Japanese science fiction character. Her husband, being a painter himself, would return from work and quietly take part. “Even when the setup regarded surreal, he helped me tweak the composition till it felt good,” she added. “That turned the inspiration of my present observe.”

What may learn on the floor as home simplicity—teddy bears or cherries in a bowl—reveals deeper psychological registers beneath Imai’s brush. These objects are neither strictly symbolic nor solely literal. They hum with one thing else: an aura of care, of reminiscence, of minor griefs and small joys.

One other new portray, CONEY ISLAND (2025), was impressed by a go to to New York. It exhibits two teddy bears in bathrobes seated quietly on a abandoned winter seaside, a shuttered amusement park within the distance. The picture evokes a melancholic stillness—a way of narrative suspended. Amusement parks, in any case, solely come alive when animated by play—their vacancy right here implies one thing extra uneasy, a pressure between peace and disquiet. The bears themselves seem inwardly animated, caught in silent dialogue or reverie.

This ambiguity is a part of what provides Imai’s work such endurance: particular however not didactic, saturated with feeling however not too sentimental. “Dwelling with my household, every of whom has totally different personalities and preferences, naturally brings about way of life modifications as my youngsters develop,” she stated. “These shifts turn out to be a gentle supply of inventive nourishment.”