Untitled. (2025) acrylic on canvas, 190 x 360 cm. Image by KÖNIG GALERIE © Courtesy of the artist and KÖNIG GALERIE
CICA Vancouver is pleased to announce a major collaboration with the Deer Lake Artist in Residence Program, welcoming acclaimed Japanese artist Ayako Rokkaku to Metro Vancouver for a residency and solo exhibition in spring 2026. As part of this partnership, Rokkaku will participate in the Deer Lake Artist in Residence Program, followed by a solo exhibition at CICA Vancouver. The residency provides a meaningful platform for local and international artistic exchange, research, and public engagement.
As part of her residency, Rokkaku will present a public Open Studio on March 18, 2026, offering audiences a rare opportunity to encounter her process at close range. Her solo exhibition, Trails of Life in the Air, will be on view at CICA Vancouver from April 10 to June 13, 2026, with an Opening Reception and Live Painting event on April 9, 2026.
Ayako Rokkaku (b. 1982, Chiba, Japan) lives and works between Berlin, Porto, and Tokyo. Known internationally for her instinctive and performative approach, Rokkaku paints directly with her bare hands, using her fingers to spread and shape acrylic paint across the canvas. This distinctive technique lends her work an immediate sense of movement, intimacy, and spontaneity, while underscoring the physical relationship between body, gesture, and image. Moving fluidly between abstraction and figuration, her vibrant paintings draw from kawaii culture, abstract expressionism, and the boundless imagination of childhood, often unfolding as fantastical worlds populated by drifting forms and imagined beings.
Created for her Vancouver exhibition, Trails of Life in the Air continues Rokkaku’s exploration of colour, motion, and the subtle presence of living forms. In this new body of work, vivid hues and drifting shapes move across the surface like air in quiet circulation. Layers of abstraction ripple and merge, within which tiny creatures and traces of life emerge and recede. They occupy a space between what can be seen and what can only be imagined: ancient yet immediate, delicate yet continually becoming.
Developed in dialogue with her time in Burnaby, this new series will also be shaped by Rokkaku’s engagement with the local community. As part of the project, she aims to create new works inspired by her experience in Metro Vancouver while learning from the cultural history and context of the region. In Rokkaku’s words, these paintings bring together “the air that comes from the land and the air that is freshly created.” The works evoke a world in continual transformation, where forms emerge, shift, and dissolve through touch, atmosphere, and motion. Together, they invite viewers into a space that feels alive, weightless, and perpetually in the process of becoming.
This project reflects CICA Vancouver’s ongoing commitment to fostering international dialogue and building meaningful connections among local and international artists, institutions, and audiences. By presenting this exhibition, CICA offers a rare opportunity to experience Rokkaku’s practice across multiple contexts, from the intimacy of the residency studio to the immediacy of live painting and the immersive space of a solo exhibition.
Events
Live Painting & Opening Reception
Thursday, April 9, 2026 | 3:00 PM – 8:00 PM
As part of the exhibition, Ayako Rokkaku will present a special Live Painting performance, offering audiences a rare opportunity to witness her intuitive and improvisational process. Painting directly with her fingers, the vivid and dreamlike worlds she creates transforms the act of painting into a meditative and immersive experience. The performance will be followed by the Opening Reception, inviting guests to celebrate the exhibition and engage more closely with the artist’s work.
The Live Painting will run approximately from 3:00 PM – 6:00 PM, and the Opening Reception will run from 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM. Bar and refreshment will be available during the Opening Reception.
Please note that this event is free, with RSVP required.
RSVP for the Live Painting & Opening Reception
Artist-led Workshop: Finger Painting
Sunday, April 12, 2026 | 2:00 – 4:00 PM
Join the artist Ayako Rokkaku on a hands-on workshop that invites participants of all ages to explore color, texture, and emotion through touch-based painting. The workshop promotes self-expression, sensory discovery, and the joy of creating without constraints, encouraging participants to experience art as play and imagination.
RSVP is Require for this Workshop
About the Artist
Ayako Rokkaku (b. 1982 in Chiba, Japan) lives and works between Berlin, Porto, and Tokyo. Her artistic process involves an instinctive and performative approach, as she uses her bare hands to apply acrylic paint, translating the motion of her body onto the canvas. True to her distinctive technique, she moulds figures with the tips of her fingers, whether on canvas, through glass, or in bronze.
Rokkaku’s visual language seamlessly shifts between elusive abstract formations and figurative elements, drawing inspiration from the kawaii culture (Japanese for cute) and capturing the boundless imagination of a child. Rokkaku is known for her colourful canvases populated by imaginary landscapes and fantastical characters. There is an ebullience, an undeniable charm, to her paintings, a lightness of being that comes into focus through the artist’s technique. The absence of any prior design or drawing for the realization of her works means that the process of bringing these paintings to life is a performative one. Indeed, Rokkaku stages live painting performances in contexts where her work will be exhibited, bringing the dialogue between the audience and artist as close to one another as the touch that animates her inspired practice. After nearly two decades of immersing her hands in acrylic and oil paint, Rokkaku expanded her artistic boundaries by challenging herself to create sculptures, using ceramics, bronze, and glass.
Rokkaku has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (2025), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (2025); CCA Andratx, Mallorca (2024); The Long Museum, Shanghai, China (2023); the Chiba Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan (2020); Museum Jan van der Togt, Amstelveen, Netherlands (2019); Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Bratislava, Slovakia (2012); and Kunsthal, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2011). In 2015, she exhibited at the Swatch Art Pavilion during the 56th Venice Biennale. Her works can be found in the collections of Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Slovakia; Voorlinden Museum, Netherlands; Gunma Museum of Art, Japan; Sehwa Museum of Art / Sehwa Art and Culture Foundation, South Korea; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Karuizawa, Japan, among others.
About Deer Lake Artist Residencies
Deer Lake Artist residencies provide unique opportunities for emerging and established artists from various disciplines, cultures and locations to create and produce new work. Multiple disciplines are represented in the residency program–visual artists, theatre artists, musicians, land-based practitioners, poets, authors and more. Residencies may include short-term housing, studio use or production, and can be as short as 2 weeks or as long as 8 weeks. The residency takes place within Deer Lake Park, located on the ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) Peoples.
This exhibition is proudly supported by
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
With special thanks to
