A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE introduces the TYPE-XVI Etsu Egami project, a new collaboration with Japanese artist Etsu Egami that brings her portrait paintings into clothing through the brand’s jacquard techniques. The project continues A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE’s approach of creating different forms of “ABLE” through encounters with artists, industries and creative fields.
CAPSULE COLLECTIONS
Egami has developed an international practice around questions of communication and perception. Her work uses vivid color, forceful brushwork and pronounced linear gestures that recall calligraphy. Through discrepancies, misperceptions and mishearing, she examines how people understand one another and where communication begins to break down.
For the first installment of TYPE-XVI, A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE selected three works from Egami’s RAINBOW portrait series: RAINBOW-Pablo Picasso, RAINBOW-Pierre-Auguste Renoir and RAINBOW-Paul Cézanne. The team translated the paintings into three blousons using jacquard weaving, carrying Egami’s varied brushstrokes and color relationships directly into textile.
The project changes the physical context of the paintings. Images originally created for viewing now take the form of garments that people can wear as part of daily life. The process allows Egami’s brushwork to interact with textile construction, volume and the human body while extending her questions about painting into another format.
Born in Chiba, Japan, in 1994, Egami graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She has since exhibited internationally and received several distinctions. She participated in the VOCA exhibition at the Ueno Royal Museum in Japan in 2020. Forbes Asia selected her for its “30 Under 30” list in 2021, the same year the Agency for Cultural Affairs sent her to New York as an emerging artist.
In 2024, Egami joined the “Asia-Pacific U30 Outstanding Young Leaders.” She received the top award at the Art Karlsruhe fair in Germany in 2025, where the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe acquired her work. Her exhibition history also includes the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the opening exhibition of OAR Museum in Korea. Alongside her studio practice, Egami works as a Visiting Professor at Kyorin University School of Medicine, where she practices art therapy.
For TYPE-XVI, Egami returned to a central question in her practice: what makes something a painting? She selected Cézanne, Renoir and Picasso because of their roles in shaping modern painting. In her portraits, she leaves the eyes and nose undefined and constructs the suggestion of a face through light, shadow, lines and brushstrokes influenced by Eastern approaches.
The three blousons extend that inquiry through clothing. Egami describes the garments as the result of a dialogue about painting, with clothing functioning as a new canvas through which the project continues to examine the definition of the medium.
