Alexa Hatanaka

September 2, 2025

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka (b. 1988, Toronto, Canada) is a Japanese-Canadian artist who lives with bipolar, all of which shapes her practice. Hatanaka received her BFA from OCAD University in Canada, including an exchange at Nanjing Arts Institute in China. Hatanaka’s work has been exhibited at Kotaro Nukaga (Tokyo, JP), Harper’s Gallery (New York, USA), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, CA), Toronto Biennial of Art (Toronto, CA), Ino Cho Paper Museum (Kochi, Japan), and NADA (Miami, New York City). Recent acquisitions include the British Museum (London, UK), Dallas Art Museum (Dallas, USA), Material Art and Design Museum (New York City, USA), Shiga Prefecture Museum (Otsu, JP), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, CA), and Wellin Museum (Clinton, USA). Hatanaka is a 2025 artist in residence at Black Rock Senegal.

Can you tell us a little bit about your practice?

I’ll start with the materials, as they are integral to my work and have great significance in themselves. I work with endangered traditional papers from East and Southeast Asia, primarily washi from Japan, which has been made within a tradition spanning over 1,000 years. The practice itself originated in China nearly 2,000 years ago. These papers are the result of generational knowledge and the papermakers’ intimate relationship to their specific place and environment. I also make my own paper using a combination of Western and Eastern methodologies and fibers. I spent time at Kashiki Seishi, a family-run washi mill in Kōchi, Japan, where I learned their entire process. The way of being at the heart of traditional crafts – living and making within the earth’s capacity – is disappearing, and I am deeply passionate about contributing to its continuity in my own small way.

In combination with the paper, I use traditional inks and natural dyes (mostly indigo and kakishibu, which is made from persimmons aged for five years), printmaking techniques, and a historical method of starching the paper employing konnyaku in order to make it more pliable and strong for sewing. One technique I often use is gyotaku, a method of making prints directly from fish using non-toxic ink. Originally, fishermen practiced it to document the size of their catches. All of these processes centre around our relationship to the earth. I am really interested in embodied knowledge that is ingrained by keen observation, repetition, and a lineage of knowledge keepers. This relates to the themes I think about in my work, centered around mental health and survival.

Within my work, I think about both collective wellness and my own personal experiences living with bipolar. Recently, I became interested in the evolutionary explanation for this condition. One idea was that during the Pleistocene era, when there were extreme and erratic shifts in weather, it may have been useful to really shut down and conserve energy when weather was unfavorable, and then, when conditions were better, to be really energetic, quick thinking, creative, and not require much sleep. I found this compelling because it also speaks to a kind of embodied knowledge in direct relationship to our environment, and therefore posits bipolar as insightful rather than being a problem needing to be cured. These marginalized ways of being, ie, neurodivergent or the making of sustainable craft traditions, are actually vital for our collective survival.

You spent 10+ years working and living in the Arctic, developing personal work but also focusing on public artworks that responded to the local community. How does that chapter of your life as an artist reflect or reveal itself in your work today?

I was fortunate to collaborate with a wide range of knowledge keepers – including hunters, elders, master sewers, printmakers, artists, and filmmakers – all with the shared purpose of creating projects with and for the youth in the community. I always saw this as a reciprocal learning experience with them, so I never really considered myself an educator. This wasn’t a pre-existing program or entity that already existed, but was born out of growing relationships and was in response to the priorities of these youths and their families, primarily the transmission of wisdom from elders to youth. Every project involved trips out on the land with elders and hunters doing things like fishing, hunting, and storytelling. So it went beyond art-making. It was integrated into our lives in general and dependent on spending meaningful time together. My time in the Arctic, mainly in Kinngait, Nunavut, really taught me that art can facilitate tangible impacts for everyone involved and facilitate genuine exchange across cultures.

I also witnessed the climate crisis firsthand, particularly in seeing how longstanding routes to hunting grounds are disappearing. In the north, going “on the land” also means traveling across the frozen sea ice. In terms of imagery, I often depict the gorgeous snowdrifts that happen most dramatically in the Arctic. The way the strong winds carve into the dense snow is akin to how I carve into the linoleum that I use to create printmaking blocks. These snow formations can also be used for navigation. I am lucky to have learned from my Inuit friends about the generational knowledge of the land required for survival.

Your work is particularly focused on the relationship with paper—often using/reusing paper and also thinking about regionally specific paper-making methods. What was your introduction to paper making and what brings you back to this medium?

I studied papermaking and was doing it in conjunction with printmaking. I loved to be able to integrate both into a piece and make use of refuse materials like old clothing or collected corn husks from a veggie stall. At the same time, I also discovered washi because it is such an amazing, stunning, and varied type of paper for printmaking.

During COVID, I also discovered that washi had actually been in my life since childhood. I changed literally everything about my life at that time (which is another long story!), and so I had to go through a six-year-old storage unit that I only ever added to but never looked at because I travel so much. In it, I found things that my grandmother had given me from Japan, notably some beautiful washi dolls. I love that, because papermaking and printmaking have such long lineages, the actions involved in the processes themselves become a shared language among practitioners.

The papermaking and printmaking also make use of all of our senses. For example, you can tell the right consistency of ink by the sound it makes on the brayer (roller). You can tell that the water in the papermaking vat is the right consistency by scooping it into your hand. We have become less and less in touch with our bodies as things have become industrialized and as technology has changed. When it comes to the alarm bells our bodies send us about mental health, we often lack the awareness to recognize them because of our broader disconnection from our bodies. I think it’s crucial to be literate in the signs our bodies give us and to remain attuned to their wisdom.

What is your relationship to scale in your works? Many of your hanging or wall-based works are particularly large and yet often modular. Relatedly, could you speak about the wearable sculptures that you create? Are these solely for performances?

I think because of my foundation in mural painting and public art, it has been very natural for me to work on a large scale…in a way that really envelopes a viewer. Some of those were collaborative procession performances, therefore quite literally at the human scale on a mass level. Because my recent work has centered on witnessing and listening to the somatic experiences and symptoms in my body, it made sense for me to create works that incorporate my body at full scale.

I became interested in making wearable work after learning, and was fascinated by the fact that, at one time, paper clothing was more common than fabric in Japan. I felt that creating wearables was a powerful way to show just how durable and functional washi is, making a case for its continued relevance as it becomes endangered. The paper’s strength comes from the long fibers used and the specialized method of forming the sheets through many thin, interspersed layers of pulp. That’s why I refer to it as a craft technology.

Between 2021 and 2023, I became deeply engaged in making wearables while working through some very difficult experiences. I approached these pieces as objects made to be worn for protection. I made several hazmat suits and garments referencing earthquake protection and traditional weather protection gear. I also made what I thought of as ‘reverse’ armors: pieces that, while acknowledging the inevitability of being hurt in this world, one can courageously keep engaging enthusiastically with life. So I made these playful paper pieces that felt good to wear and brought me a sense of joy. Within that, I also made paper costumes for musicians and for a collaborative dance performance. When these pieces are later installed as sculptures, they hold the memory and energy of those performances.

You have been travelling significantly throughout your career. How does your travel manifest in your practice? Does this type of movement, nomadism, relate to the work beyond the modular nature of some of the pieces?

Traveling started to expand my research into regional papermaking. Last year, I went to villages in Northern Vietnam and learned about the specific fibers, techniques, and purpose of paper there. In a very tangible way, I started using the paper I bought there in my work.

Another way that travel influences my work is within my practice of gyotaku. I always print fish when I travel somewhere that has a close relationship to the water and fish as sustenance. This draws connections across time and space, and I see these as a way to document or archive. I feel that the full-circle process of eating the fish after printing it deeply engrains those memories into the prints, which I later sew into larger pieces. Fishing has always held significant importance for me, as my grandfather and great-grandfather were fishermen. Within my practice, I often draw on different mythologies about fish in my work, while also grounding it in my own significant experiences of fishing.

Lastly, and importantly, travel influences my work because of the relationships I build. While I was in residence at Kashiki Seishi, the family washi mill I mentioned earlier, I was lucky to befriend a master washi paper maker, Tatsuyuki Kitaoka. I now commission him to make handmade papers that I use for a series of works where I print across hundreds of small pieces of paper. Because the farmers are too elderly now and no one is taking up their roles, anyone carrying on washi making has to do the entire process from harvest to sheet forming. This is such a remarkable labor of love that I respect and am so happy that it is part of my work.

What are you interested in these days? Is there anything we can look forward to seeing in the future?

I am interested in how I can address or stir up discussions of mental health with my work. Whenever I have struggled with my bipolar condition, I’ve sought out the words of others recounting experiences that felt similar to my own. I think it’s normal to want to find a way not to feel alone. I hope in some way, my work can reflect someone’s feelings back to them, making them feel connected or seen.

I’ve been developing a body of work that maps the prevalence of words over time, particularly pathologized terms like ‘anxiety’ and ‘loneliness.’ Bipolar disorder remains heavily stigmatized, and I want my work to be part of changing that. I’ve been interested in exploring cultures that have historically approached mental health as something to be aided communally, recognizing that we all need and affect one another. Today, mental health is predominantly treated as a problem that the individual has to solve. I hope inserting themes of mental health in my work will facilitate discussion and awareness.

I’m also, of course, still serious about championing sustainable craft technologies! I want to go to Korea and China to research more about paper. I may be travelling to Thailand to try my hand at making paper from indigo plants and learning about indigo dying there as well. The places people can see my work coming up in person are at the Armory Show in New York with Patel Brown Gallery, the Azores Biennial, Tokyo Gendai fair with Kotaro Nukaga, and the Prince Takamado gallery in Tokyo.

Alexa Hatanaka

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