Okokume

Okokume is the professional name of Laura Mas Hernandez, a Spanish artist born in 1985 in Mataro, near Barcelona, Catalonia. Spanish-language sources give her exact birth date as 27 July 1985, though that date rests on a single encyclopedic source and should be treated with some caution. She began studying art at a local academy in Mataro from around age eight and later earned a degree in Advertising Graphic Design from the Llotja Advanced School of Art and Design in Barcelona, graduating in 2010.

Her practice centers on a recurring painted and sculpted figure she calls Cosmic Girl, used across paintings and sculptural works to explore themes of femininity, resilience, and connection to the cosmos. She lives and works in Barcelona, where gallery and press sources describe her as sharing a studio with her partner, the artist Okrabelo. Her international career developed largely through JPS Art Gallery, which staged early solo exhibitions in Hong Kong from the mid-2010s and has continued to present her work across its Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Paris spaces. She has also participated in a Seoul residency and exhibition program with Artivist and shown at additional Asian and European venues.

Okokume's public profile has been built primarily through gallery and fair coverage rather than institutional criticism. Spanish press has framed her as a painter little known at home who found early commercial success in Japan, and Catalan outlets have described her as a record-setting presence in the Japanese market. Phillips' own catalogue notes single out her 2018 exhibition at K11 Art Space in Hong Kong as her largest solo show to date. No exact, attributable quotation from a named critic at a major outlet was located in current research, so none is reproduced here.

Okokume's documented auction activity is limited and concentrated in Asia. The highest price identified in current research is HKD 403,200 (roughly USD 51,700) for the painting Cosmic Girl Head at Phillips Hong Kong; the exact calendar date of that sale was not confirmed in the sources reviewed. The next-highest documented result is Peek-a-boo, also sold at Phillips Hong Kong, for HKD 277,200. Other identified results are smaller, including a 2019 sale of Cosmic Water for TWD 144,000 at Ravenel's Taipei autumn auction and a sculptural edition, Bringing Hope: Cosmic Girl, that sold for JPY 345,000 through SBI Art Auction in Japan. Spanish-language sources describe her broadly as one of the fastest-growing contemporary artists in the auction market since 2020, but that characterization is a general claim rather than a documented price series, and it should be read as a market narrative rather than a verified trend.

Okokume's market is young, thin, and geographically concentrated in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, with only a handful of public auction results to date and no catalogue raisonne. Her exact birth date relies on a single source and should be treated as a well-sourced but unconfirmed data point, and no museum collection holding her work has been documented. Her primary gallery relationship, with JPS Art Gallery, is currently the strongest available signal of representation and continuity for collectors evaluating her work.