Ulala Imai

Ulala Imai was born in 1982 in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, and continues to live and work in the Kanagawa and Tokyo area.

She earned a BFA in oil painting from the Faculty of Art and Design at Tama Art University in Tokyo in 2004, and in 2009 completed the coursework of the university's doctoral program at the Graduate School of Art and Design, though sources close to the artist, including the Ueshima Museum, specify that she left the program without the degree being conferred.

Imai paints observational still lifes, plush toys, convenience-store snacks, character merchandise, and other domestic objects, rendered with a flattened, matter-of-fact intimacy that critics and galleries connect to memory and childhood. Her exhibition history runs through Tokyo's Parco Museum, Nonaka-Hill in Los Angeles and Kyoto, Karma in New York, Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, and international fairs including Art Basel. In 2012 she received the Kunio Motoe Jury Encouragement Prize as part of the Shell Art Award.

Imai has not yet accumulated a substantial body of quoted art criticism in major outlets, but her institutional trajectory speaks clearly to how she is being read. She has been included in group presentations at the Aspen Art Museum and the 15th Shanghai Biennale, alongside solo exhibitions at Tokyo's Parco Museum and at her representing galleries. Gallery and museum texts consistently frame her still lifes as a study of intimacy, memory, and popular culture filtered through domestic objects. The critical narrative to date is one of rapid, gallery-and-museum-led validation that has outpaced her auction history.

Imai's auction market is small and recent. The best-documented public result is HKD 889,000, roughly USD 113,700 at standard 2023 exchange rates, for the painting In the Kitchen at a Phillips Hong Kong sale in 2023, against a presale estimate of HKD 500,000 to 700,000; the precise sale date could not be independently confirmed beyond the year. More recent activity has settled lower: a 2025 painting sold at a Sotheby's New York day sale for USD 33,000, within a presale estimate of USD 30,000 to 50,000.

Imai's market is thin. Her best-documented auction result, HKD 889,000, roughly USD 113,700, for In the Kitchen at Phillips Hong Kong in 2023, has not been matched since, with more recent public results, including a 2025 New York day sale, settling well below that figure. There is no catalogue raisonne, so verification of a given work should run through her representing galleries, Nonaka-Hill and Xavier Hufkens, and her long exhibition history with Karma, rather than through a published archive. Given the small number of public sales, collectors should treat any single auction result as an outlier rather than a trend line, and weight museum and gallery placement heavily when assessing durability.