Fresh to Shanghai from recent exhibitions in Los Angeles, AIKO will be participating in the JIA Hotel and Andrew James Art residency program for one month to prepare for her first solo exhibition in Asia.

AIKO (Nakagawa) was born in Tokyo but has been living and working in New York since the late ’90. Speaking very little English at the time she found a job to be an artist assistant to fellow Japanese artist Takashi Murakami who was also just starting out life in New York. By 1999 she had founded the Brooklyn based international art collective Faile who went on to have international success only succeeded by Banksy in the urban art world.

In 2008 AIKO decided to go it alone and focus on her solo work which consists of floral designs, girlish cartoons and street pop culture images are all incorporated on her mixed media works. AIKO utilizes both stencil, spraypaint and silkscreen print techniques to create her vibrant large-scale works which often transform “cupcake” images to playfully portray female sexuality and beauty. Being an immigrant from Japan, AIKO has herself been discovering Americana-type pop imagery and recreating it in an innovative way.

She has recently shown her works at Brooklyn Museum in NY, MACRO Future in Rome, the Deitch Project in Miami, and Shanghai MoCA in China as well as major galleries and museums in US, Europe and Asia.