Audrey Kawasaki: How Innocence and Eroticism Coexist in Art

Dreamlike and eerie, grotesque, innocent and erotic, spectral and real; all of this is Audrey Kawasaki’s Art (California - March 31,1982). Kawasaki is a second-generation Japanese-American artist who grew up in Los Angeles, surrounded by Japanese music, TV show and Manga, which have served as a sort of inspiration for her oil paintings on wooden slabs.

She attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she began to depict sensuous, attractive yet disturbing, young women, with a strong emphasis on line quality and facial expression. Despite several of her professors suggesting that she should stay away from her particular style of painting nudes, it was ultimately these same paintings have made her famous all over the world.

However, this was not the reason why she left Pratt Institute before graduating, as she revealed in an interview with “MacTribe.com” some years ago: “I would have agreed with them, if I wanted to pursue ‘fine art’ in New York art standards: very conceptual, and to me, inaccessible and too high class. I think the west coast is much more accepting of young artists”.

Today her style has been described as a fusion of Japanese manga, ukiyo-e, Art Nouveau and primary influences like Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Alphonse Mucha. In 2005, Kawasaki designed the cover art for Alice Smith’s For Lovers, Dreamers & Me, and as of 2006, Kawasaki has been considered a rising star in the Los Angeles art scene, and has started developing more commercial products such as phone skins and skateboards, for which she is becoming known around the world.

Recently, she revealedthat she learned from Japanese manga comics: “I wanted to be a manga artist. Girls with big dreamy, twinkling eyes, and cheesy girly drama. I still think you can see the influence in my current things, though. Like in the attention to line flow and eyes and expression”.

She appreciates Japanese culture not only for their manga worship, but also because Japanese “people put so much time and effort into what they do and make. Everything is well thought out, well designed and organized, and I think that comes from the people being so devoted to what they do. I like that about their culture”. In 2009 she was in Tokyo for her first exhibition in Japan, at Space Yui, and, looking back during an interview with Manifesto in 2012, she said: “I feel connected to my Japanese roots, but walking around in a city like Tokyo felt so otherworldly and dreamlike. I wouldn’t say it directly influenced my work, but it heightened my awareness of clashing cultures and identity in a way.

And when the journalist asked her what drew her to the woman she is used to painting, she answered: “She is my muse; an imaginary fictitious, mysterious being I have developed over the years. She is the one I have been obsessed and haunted by, and who I am constantly chasing after, and who I grasp onto for a mere moment, and am forced to let go, and that is what keeps me painting”.