Kei Imazu

Kei Imazu was born in 1980 in Yamaguchi, Japan. She earned a BA and, in 2007, an MA in fine art with a focus on painting from Tama Art University in Tokyo. Early institutional recognition came in 2009, when she received the Prize for Excellence at VOCA, held at the Ueno Royal Museum in Tokyo, followed by an Encouragement Award at the 5th Kinutani Koji Award in 2013.

Imazu builds her paintings from source imagery drawn from historical archives, colonial-era photographs, mythology, and internet searches, which she digitally composites before translating the resulting image by hand into oil on canvas. In 2017 she relocated to Bandung, Indonesia, where she continues to live and work, a move that has shaped a practice attentive to Southeast Asian history, ecology, and colonial memory alongside her Japanese training.

Her international profile grew through the 2019 Aichi Triennale and Mori Art Museum's Roppongi Crossing, and expanded further in 2022 with her inclusion in documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany, as part of the WAGIWAGI collective project. In 2023 she held her first solo exhibition in the United States, Sowed Them to the Earth, at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. In 2025 Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery presented Tanah Air, her first mid-career survey, and Museum MACAN in Jakarta staged the solo exhibition The Sea Is Barely Wrinkled.

Imazu's practice is consistently framed around her method: composing an image digitally from disparate archival, colonial, and mythological sources before rebuilding it by hand in paint, a process institutions have described in archaeological terms. Her inclusion in documenta fifteen and the Aichi Triennale placed her within a wider conversation about art that excavates colonial and ecological history in Southeast Asia, while her Japanese training and continuing exhibition history in Tokyo keep her work read against both traditions. The 2025 survey at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery has been treated by Japanese institutions as confirmation of her standing as a significant mid-career painter.

Imazu's auction market is young and thin, concentrated mainly in Southeast Asian and Japanese sale rooms. Her auction high is Wooo (2017), which sold for SGD 342,900 (about USD 253,578), roughly triple its high estimate, at a Sotheby's Singapore sale reported in the 2026 auction season; the exact sale date has not been published in the sources available. Additional lots have appeared at SBI Art Auction in Japan and at Sotheby's Hong Kong contemporary sales, but public sale volume remains limited, so any single result should be read on its own terms rather than as part of a smooth trend line.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Imazu, and her market is still early stage, with representation concentrated in two galleries, ANOMALY in Tokyo and ROH Projects in Jakarta. Her auction history is short and geographically concentrated in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan, so any single result should be weighed against the small number of comparable sales available. Growing institutional recognition, including documenta fifteen, museum holdings such as the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the 2025 survey at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, points to expanding visibility, but collectors should treat her auction market as emerging rather than established.