Asami Shoji

Asami Shoji is a rising star on the Japanese contemporary art scene, whose paintings explore the murky relationship between Eros and Thanatos. Her figures, often featuring disproportionate arms and hands and whose expressive faces range from grimacing to candid, emerge from a haze of colors and clouds. These spectral apparitions with their diaphanous auras emerge from the innermost depths of the images, brought together in an atmosphere that ranges from confrontation to reconciliation. The artist makes them coexist in the same pictorial space, taking the form of alien figures in the same social body. They are suspended in a spellbinding transition, composing intricate scenes of tenderness and violence, consumed by the vertiginous proximity of love and death.

Asami Shoji paints in oils, mostly on canvas, but also on transparent sheets of acrylic or on glass, occasionally adopting monotype techniques. Her nude figures, through which the viewer can on occasion discern the background landscape, are nonetheless resolutely organic, their skeletons and organs exposed beneath the skin “extending definitively beyond the confines of flesh”, as the artist herself states.

Asami Shoji was born in 1988 in Fukishima, Japan. She was awarded an MFA in printmaking at Tama Art University in Tokyo in 2012. Amongst other distinctions, she was awarded the Grand Prize at the FACE exhibition in 2019 and an Emerging Artist Award at the Gotoh Memorial Cultural Awards in 2020. Her work has featured in numerous group exhibitions in Japanese museums (Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kanagawa; Ashikaga Museum of Art, Tochigi; Kurume City Art Museum, Fukuoka; Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, etc.). In 2024, she will take part in an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.