MIWAKO NAGAOKA

Japan, 1945

KITAI

Miwako Nagaoka is a voracious reader and a lover of literature. She is also a sho artist, a painter and a practitioner of iai, the ancient Japanese martial art of drawing a sword quickly in response to a sudden attack. The “Recomposed Character” is an artistic technique developed by Nagaoka in which she takes a single character that resonates in her subconscious mind from a page of her favourite novel, uses a dry brush to draw this character as a work of sho, and decomposes the support to create an image representative of the character.