Misa Funai

Born in Kyoto Prefecture in 1974, contemporary artist Funai Misa graduated from Kyoto Seika University in 1996 with a BFA in Japanese painting, and earned an MFA from the University of Tsukuba in 2001. Her work explores the medium of painting and reflects on the boundary between image, painting, and reality. She has pioneered new forms of pictorial expression, such as through works in which mirrors depicting imaginary plants, animals, and paradise scenes are placed on the walls, inverting figure and ground, and fiction and reality, and works in which the entire exhibition space is used as a canvas, immersing the viewer in the work. Recent major exhibitions include “A Scoop of Light” (Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo, 2021), “4th Collection Exhibition 2020” (Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, 2021), the solo show “Paradise / Boundary, where we were once” (Aomori Contemporary Art Centre, 2017), and “VOCA: The Vision of Contemporary Art” (Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, 2010, 2009).