Etsu Egami Japan, b. 1994

Etsu Egami was born in 1994 in Tokyo, Japan, and lives and works between Tokyo and New York. Her formation was genuinely international from the start. She grew up between Japan, the United States, and Europe, an experience that placed the question of cross-cultural communication at the very center of her practice. Egami graduated with a BFA in Oil Painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing in 2016, one of Asia's most rigorous and prestigious art institutions. She subsequently pursued her MFA at CAFA under the direct mentorship of Liu Xiao Dong, one of China's most celebrated figurative painters, before undertaking further studies at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HFG) in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 2023, she was selected by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan, for a prestigious artist dispatch to New York, a recognition of her standing within Japan's contemporary art landscape.

Egami's paintings take as their subject the invisible architecture of human communication: the gap between what is said and what is heard, the visual residue of mishearing and mistranslation, the way meaning shifts and fractures across languages and cultures. She has described language as something that "can only be sensed, not explained," and this conviction drives a practice in which large-scale oil paintings become fields of prismatic color threaded through with dense, interwoven lines that seem to oscillate between figuration and abstraction. Her Rainbow series, developed across multiple bodies of work, distills this approach into compositions of extraordinary chromatic intensity. Works such as Modern Woman (2023), Get The Party Started (2023), Social Distancing (2024), and Song of Traveller (2026) demonstrate the sustained formal ambition of her practice, each canvas a negotiation between the legible and the dissolved, the personal and the universal.

The institutional recognition of Etsu Egami's practice is extensive and international. Her work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Grand Palais in Paris, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Para Site Art Space in Hong Kong, the HOW Art Museum in Shanghai, the Chiba City Museum of Art in Japan, and the Tomioka Museum of Art, among many others. She has received the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2019), the 16th Chiba City Government Art and Culture New Star Prize (2018), and was a finalist for the CAF Award in Tokyo (2020). She was named to Forbes Asia's 30 Under 30 list in both 2020 and 2021, and was recognized as Most Popular Artist on Artsy in 2021. Her work is held in institutional collections including the Woodone Museum of Art and the He Art Museum, as well as in significant private collections across Asia, Europe, and the United States.

Egami's exhibition history spans Asia, Europe, and North America. Solo presentations include In a Moment of Misunderstanding, All the Masks Fall (Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2021-22, curated by Tatehata Akira with a text by Jérôme Sans); Rainbow (Seoul, 2022, curated by Tom Morton); Oriental Mystery (HOW Art Museum, Shanghai, 2023); and Time (Bangkok Space, 2023). Group exhibitions have taken her to Hong Kong, Seoul, Paris, and beyond, with critical texts and curatorial framing by figures including Jérôme Sans, former director of the Palais de Tokyo.

Etsu Egami is represented by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin, which has built a sustained and ambitious international program around her work. The gallery has presented Egami at Art Karlsruhe (2025, where her One-Artist Show was awarded the art karlsruhe Preis for outstanding solo presentations, and 2026), Art Cologne (2024 and 2025), KIAF Seoul (2025), Asia Now Paris (2024), West Bund Art & Design Shanghai (2024), and Art Düsseldorf (2026), establishing her presence across the most significant art fair platforms in Europe and Asia.

With each new body of work, Etsu Egami deepens a practice that is as philosophically grounded as it is visually immediate, one in which the experience of living between cultures becomes the raw material for painting of genuine urgency and beauty.