Very good condition.
Each piece is signed and dated in the upper right corner on the back.

Saya Aokabi (b. 1997) is a Japanese contemporary artist. Drawing on the anime culture she has been immersed in since childhood as a foundational landscape, she focuses on the cel animation techniques widely used in the Japanese animation industry around the 1990s. Her character modeling develops in dialogue with the aesthetic and cultural contexts that shaped anime production during that era. Aokabi employs a hybrid process that combines analog and digital techniques to construct detailed visual information for her characters. These images are projected onto canvas using a projector, then hand-painted with acrylics. While the process is highly methodical, her works are distinguished by the unpredictable expressions and subtle ambiguities that emerge through physical interactions with the materials, such as the texture of the paint and the shimmer of brushstrokes.

This work, '20210221', consists of two acrylic paintings, created in 2021. One of the paintings depicts the profile of a woman gasping for breath, as if frozen in time. The other presents a strikingly eroded version of that same image, where abrasions in the paint appear as a direct transcription of the woman’s fading presence.

HENKYO, Tokyo