b. 1996, Japan
Lives and works in Japan
Fumiya Odagawa graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts with a BFA in Nihonga (Japanese Painting) in 2018, and completed his MFA in the same discipline in 2020.
Odagawa captures the quiet, fleeting moments of everyday life through a distinctive visual language that is dreamlike yet tinged with melancholy. The figures, animals, and landscapes that inhabit his paintings are drawn from personal experience and scenes encountered during his travels. Fragmentary impressions and emotional traces are layered together, collage-like, into a unified landscape.
Rooted in the refined sensibilities of Nihonga, Odagawa's paintings make careful use of negative space and interval. The eye moves gently through compositions shaped by quiet rhythms, while translucent layers of color softly dissolve into one another, allowing quiet narratives to unfold across the painted surface.
Beyond technique, Odagawa is drawn to what he describes as "the feeling that as you grow closer to someone, somewhere, another person is quietly slipping away." His paintings inhabit this delicate tension between the fragility of human connection and the tenderness that surrounds it, inviting viewers into spaces where memory, emotion, and time remain fluid rather than fixed.
Since his debut solo exhibition in 2019, Odagawa has exhibited regularly in Tokyo and internationally, with a solo exhibition in Taipei in 2025 and continued participation in art fairs, including One Art Taipei. In 2026, he held solo exhibitions Living out quiet of summer at EVERANDART and Wistfully awaiting a warm breeze at DDD ART in Tokyo. That same year, he received the Acrylic Prize at the Jackson’s Art Prize, reflecting the growing international recognition of his practice.