Hana Usui

Hana Usui (ウスイ　ハナ, Usui Hana, born April 17, 1974 in Tokyo) is a Japanese artist.

Hana Usui was born in Tokyo in 1974 and studied art history at Waseda University and Japanese calligraphy. In 2000, she moved to Vienna to start a career as a free visual artist. In the years that followed she primarily worked in Berlin. Since 2011, Hana Usui has lived and worked in Vienna (Austria) and Bolzano-Bozen (Italy). Her drawings are made of black or white oil paint, which she carves into paper with a screwdriver and often embeds into ink washes.[1]

"The works of the Japanese artist Hana Usui, who was born in Tokyo in 1974, are, however restrained, of great complexity. This is true of the relationship of oil drawing and ink painting (or photography), of the combination of drawing and painting techniques, of linear conciseness and spaciousness. The resulting richness of levels of expression also characterises the critical works that have dominated in recent years. Those on the history of her own country, on Fukushima or Hiroshima, give the subject a new dimension by avoiding anything striking or the purely documentary and are never to be seen as a political manifesto. Thanks to this distancing and mere suggestion and the symbolic in the artistic media, they gain, one might say, in quiet intensity and at the same time remain open to questions. In this way, freed of their historical context, warning and appeal demonstrate their enduring validity."[2]