KYOKA ABE

Artist Bio

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Kyoka Abe is a fourth year Fine Art (BA) student at the Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh.

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Kyoka’s work finds a place between fantasy and reality for her characters to temporary escape from the real world. The characters' masks express themes derived from socio-cultural issues and act as devices to remove their identity, freeing them from the external world. In a world where one’s inherited, social identity is removed, their issues become illusory. She depicts subliminal pathos in a humorous manner through childlike representations.

She works through processes such as filming, projection and painting. She paints on rust dyed canvas with visible paint and pencil marks. Dripped turpentine creates thin jagged lines through paints in response to the rough surface of the canvas, revealing the layer underneath. The physicality of these raw marks is a crevice in the characters’ fantasy world where the reality leaks through.