Audrey Kawasaki is a Japanese-American artist, born and raised in Los Angeles, where she currently lives and works.
Kawasaki grew up reading Japanese manga comics, which inspired her to draw from an early age. She started taking after-school fine art classes at Mission Renaissance in her late teenage years. There she learned the basic foundation of drawing and painting. She attended Pratt Institute in New York after graduating high school, but left after two years without completion of degree. She started professionally showing at various art galleries in the US and internationally since 2005.
Kawasaki’s work contains contrasting themes of innocence and eroticism, conveying the mysterious intrigue of feminine sensuality. Her sharp imagery is painted with precision onto wooden panels, the natural grain adding warmth to her enigmatic subject matter. The artist’s creative influences include eastern as well as western traditions such as Art Nouveau and Japanese Manga comics. She paints sultry, seductive and uninhibited female subjects with delicate beauty and provocative, direct eye contact. Their graceful gestures and ghost-like features carry mysterious expressions of melancholy and longing.
Audrey likes noodles, broth, audiobooks, video games, dancing, the paranormal, and white wine spritzers.
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HERETIC BEAUTY
A Survey of Women Artists Expanding the Language of Contemporary Surrealism June 27 - July 18, 2026KP Projects presents Heretic Beauty, a survey of women artists who are shaping and expanding the visual language of figuration and Pop Surrealism.Read more
Bridging traditional painting, surrealist imagination, Street Art and contemporary visual culture, the exhibition honors the fierceness, strength, and beauty of artists whose work has redefined narrative figuration over the past several decades.
Emerging from the underground and evolving into an internationally recognized movement, Pop Surrealism has long been associated with bold imagery, dream logic, cultural hybridity, and emotional intensity. Within this landscape, these women artists have played a critical and defining role, not as muses, but as authors. By pushing their practice into new psychological, symbolic, and emotional territory. Heretic Beauty brings together a dynamic group of artists whose work reflects personal mythology, values, and collective cultural memory.
Participating artists include Jennybird Alcantara, Allison Bamcat, Julie Beezy, April Bey, Camille Rose Garcia, Lori Earley, Tanya Haden, Samantha Harrison, Seonna Hong, Audrey Kawasaki, Kukula, Laurie Lipton, Junko Mizuno, Laurie Nelson, Lezley Saar, Miss Van and Hannah Yata. The works span delicate graphite and watercolor, bold and lush acrylic and oil painting, precise graphic line- work, and layered mixed media, with each artist building her own symbolic language that redefines notions of femininity, sensuality, power, vulnerability, fantasy, defiance, and transformation.
Rather than presenting a single aesthetic, Heretic Beauty reveals the breadth of voices within Surreal traditions, from gothic fairytale worlds and intimate psychological portraits, to luminous dreamscapes and mythic figures. The exhibition highlights how these artists use traditional techniques to build new visual narratives.
At its core, Heretic Beauty is both a celebration and a recognition of artists who have been integral to the evolution of the movement. By shaping its visual and emotional vocabulary from the inside, figurative painting becomes a site of imagination, resistance, defiance, determination, tenderness, strength and solidarity. It is a place where inner worlds and cultural narratives alchemize into something sharper beneath the surface. -
25TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION
August 6 - 27, 2022Read more
