Artist Bio
Rina
Born in 1998 in Hokkaido, Japan.
Based in London,Tokyo
Self-taught oil painter.
Artist Statement
Her experience as a nurse, where she was confronted with life and death on a daily basis, profoundly changed her understanding of both.
It led her to question what it means to be alive and became the foundation of her artistic practice.
She later moved to the UK in search of a deeper understanding of life and the human experience.
Living within a different culture and encountering unfamiliar ways of thinking gradually shaped her view of life as something formed through the coexistence of opposites: light and darkness, joy and suffering, hope and despair. Rather than seeing these as opposing forces, she understands them as inseparable aspects of human existence, each containing the other.
Her work explores the space between these opposites, where beauty and cruelty exist alongside the emotions and experiences that lie beneath everyday life. She is particularly interested in memory, emotion, and our perceptions of life and death—experiences that are often difficult to put into words or fully understand through reason alone.
For her, Surrealism is not simply a visual style, but a way of looking beyond the structures through which conscious thought organises reality.
By bringing together unrelated images, symbols, and imagined situations, she reconstructs fragments of memory and emotion that are difficult to grasp in their original form. Through this process, she seeks to reveal a space between reality and imagination, and between the conscious and the unconscious.
Life and death, light and darkness, reality and fantasy constantly intersect and coexist.
It is within these uncertain and shifting boundaries that she finds the subjects of her work.
Through her practice, she continues to explore what it means to be human and what it means to live, while reflecting on the complexity, fragility, and depth of life itself.