Azuki Furuya graduated with an MFA from Brooklyn College in 2019. Born in Sapporo, Japan, she lives and works in Tokyo. Furuya's ingenious works on paper explore the brightness of life and the fragility of existence, with the material process itself as a form of storytelling.

 

After drawing the composition from a photograph, she builds it up with layered bits of colored paper, meticulously sands down the surface until it is exposed like a derelict billboard, and paints inside and around the contours. Furuya then turns the discarded paper shavings into pulp, shapes it into objects she calls Ashes, and transfers the original photo onto the paper object. Each work thus completes a full cycle – from a photograph of a subject to its remembered, processed representation to a memento mori capturing the fragility of memory.