Aiko Nakagawa
$2,500
Japanese (1975)
About the artist:
Aiko Nakagawa was born in 1975 and raised in the central area of Tokyo. She attended an all-girl high school. While she was in college in Tokyo, she created a pirate television station that broadcast her own music videos and short films. The broadcast could be picked up within a three-kilometer radius and generated some local press coverage before the government sent her a letter ordering her to desist. In the mid-1990s, she moved to New York City where she apprenticed in artist Takashi Murakami's Brooklyn studio. Her and Muramaki's work are similar by their incorporation of Japanese culture, and have even worked with high-end fashion designer, Louis Vuitton. She studied media studies at the New School University and wheat pasted naked images of herself around the city.
Towards the end of the 1990s Aiko collaborated with artists Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller. The three formed the street art collective FAILE (then A-life) in 1998. Together the artists created "large format, monochromatic, screen-printed female nudes," among other work. They collective became very popular through this style which worked similarly across media from posters, to prints, to gallery works on canvas. In 2006, Lady Aiko left the collective.
In 2005 she collaborated with fellow street artist Banksy for his film Exit Through the Gift Shop.
Aiko's work was included in the Museum of Sex's erotic street art exhibition in 2012. Later that year she created the mural Here's Fun for Everyone on New York City's Bowery Wall. She was the first woman artist to be invited to paint the wall.
In 2013, she attended the international street art festival Nuart in Stavanger, Norway, alongside fellow female graffiti artists Martha Cooper and Faith 47. Working on two walls of a tunnel below the Tou Scene arts centre, she created a work with stenciled representations of silhouettes, women, angels, Mount Fuji, butterflies, flowers and a rabbit holding an aerosol paint can to represent female energy. The same year she designed a characteristic floral and feminine scarf for luxury brand Louis Vuitton alongside other street artists Retna and Os Gemeos.
Aiko Nakagawa was born in 1975 and raised in the central area of Tokyo. She attended an all-girl high school. While she was in college in Tokyo, she created a pirate television station that broadcast her own music videos and short films. The
$2,500