For a long time, I let color evolve on its own. In response to this formal freedom, I painted and drew in bright colors, joyful, impatient, and animalized beings, with animality representing, for me, a possibility of freedom that humans could take as a model.
— Makiko Furuichi
Born in 1987 in Kanazawa, Japan, Makiko Furuichi has been living and working in France since 2009. A graduate of the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nantes and the Kanazawa College of Art, she works in watercolor, painting, and drawing. She also explores installations and sculptures using diverse materials such as ceramics, cement, dyed fabric, bronze, or printed media. Her work includes large-scale frescoes imbued with fantastical atmospheres.
Inspired by supernatural creatures from Japanese folklore that interact with the human world, Makiko Furuichi’s practice goes beyond narrative or aesthetic elements drawn from tradition, becoming a means to explore contemporary concepts such as the hybridization of humans and nature, the relationship to the invisible, and transformation. Through these myths, Furuichi investigates the boundary between the living and the inanimate, otherness and metamorphosis, strangeness and the unknown, while incorporating a humorous dimension that brings lightness to an increasingly violent contemporary context.
Makiko Furuichi exhibits regularly in Europe and Asia, with solo exhibitions including Frac des Pays de la Loire in 2018, Le Carré, Scène nationale de Château-Gontier in 2021, the Marc Chagall Museum in Nice in 2023, MASC, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain des Sables d’Olonne in 2024, and Frac Normandie in 2025.
She has received numerous awards, including the Prix des Arts Visuels de la Ville de Nantes in 2018 and the Ackerman + Fontevraud residency in 2022.