ASA MIZUNO

A Painter Who Never Turned Away

I. Beginnings

Asa Mizuno was born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1945, the year the war ended. She was born as one of twins; her sister died the following day. Mizuno herself weighed only 1.35 kilograms at birth, and doctors doubted she would survive. She was unable to stand until the age of five.

As a child, while others played outside, Mizuno drew. The world reached her differently, and she answered it through images.

At fourteen, she was taken to the studio of Masayoshi Nakamura, one of the most radical figures in postwar Japanese painting. Nakamura immediately recognized something exceptional in her work. He urged her parents not to send her to high school, telling them that she had already reached a place beyond what conventional training could produce.

From that point on, Mizuno began visiting Nakamura’s home regularly, sketchbook in hand, to show him her work.

His instruction was unlike ordinary art education. He did not teach technique. He did not teach art history. He did not encourage her to study other painters.

His teaching was simple:

Tada kake.
Just paint.

Mizuno has followed that instruction ever since.

II. The Thirteen Years of Silence

In 1977, Nakamura died of lung cancer at the age of fifty-two. Mizuno had known him since she was fourteen and had visited his home once a month for eighteen years. His death was a profound loss.

“I became like a ship without a compass,” she later wrote.

For thirteen years, she exhibited nothing.

When she returned to public exhibition in 1990, her work had not weakened. The same direct, uncompromising vision remained. If anything, the years of silence had deepened it.

The novelist Tsutomu Minakami, who had first encountered Mizuno’s work through Nakamura, later recalled the force of her paintings:

“I held my breath. The paintings were large, wild, and impossible to describe — a force that struck you like a blow.”

III. The Work

Asa Mizuno has painted for more than six decades. She works across Japanese painting, oil, gouache, pastel, mixed media, and collage, moving freely between materials without hierarchy or fixed system.

Her subjects are equally wide-ranging: faces, Buddhas, road gods, flowers, nudes, mountains, self-portraits, and people encountered during her travels. In Nepal, she sketched the people of Kathmandu on handmade paper. She has painted Mount Everest on a monumental scale. She has also made self-portraits in the middle of the night, as if entering into dialogue with earlier versions of herself.

Her total output exceeds forty thousand works.

The art critic Ichiro Hariu, one of Japan’s most respected voices in postwar art, wrote of her work:

“Within its primitive force, Mizuno’s painting conceals a depth of passion bordering on the daemonic. The colours, of unparalleled intensity, and the uninhibited brushwork violently deform their subjects — and within the seemingly casual figures and flowers, something surfaces that resembles the extreme limits of existence itself.”

He also noted that from Mizuno’s solitude, physical difficulty, and distance from Japan’s central art establishment emerged “a supreme enchantment and a humour of extraordinary range.”

IV. Painting and Poetry

Mizuno is also a poet. She has published twelve collections of poetry. For her, painting and poetry are not separate acts, but two ways of approaching what cannot otherwise be said.

She once described her creative life in a single sentence:

“I paint what I want to paint. What comes out is the most honest version of myself at that moment.”

In Kathmandu, what moved her was not the scenery, but the people.

“Unlike Japanese people, they are not dulled. They live with full intensity — and that struck me.”

The faces she brought back from those journeys are not conventional travel images. They are immediate, inhabited, and charged with the same inner force that runs through all of her work.

V. A Singular Position

Asa Mizuno occupies a singular position in Japanese art.

She was guided privately for eighteen years by Masayoshi Nakamura, one of the most important painters of postwar Japan. Yet the result was not imitation. Nakamura’s greatest gift may have been to protect her from influence long enough for something entirely her own to form.

What emerged is a body of work that looks unlike anything else in Japanese art: crowds of faces exploding with colour, portraits that seem to reach beyond appearance, landscapes painted not as scenery but as inner experience.

Gallery Hagurodo in Tokyo, which has represented her work for decades, wrote:

“She has followed Nakamura’s words — just paint — with absolute fidelity. This was said more than forty years ago. It would not be strange if something had changed along the way. Nothing has.”

VI. Now

Asa Mizuno is eighty years old. She lives in Nagoya and remains, by all accounts, alert, sharp, humorous, and entirely herself.

The atelier where she painted for decades still stands. Her garden still grows. Thousands of works remain: from small intimate pieces to large-scale paintings — including a monumental four-meter depiction of Mount Fuji on fusuma sliding panels.

Some of her works are held by Nagoya Gallery and the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, and others continue to emerge into public view.

Her work is finding the world later than it should have.

But it is finding it.