Alexa Hatanaka at the Venice Biennale: ‘Embodied Ecologies of Paper, Water, and Memory’

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, a queer Japanese-Canadian artist born in 1988, is a prominent figure at the Venice Biennale. Alexa Hatanaka primarily works with paper, utilising printmaking, ink drawing, and natural dyeing alongside sewing. She also interacts with traditional paper materials and techniques that both demand and support a clean environment. These modifications of customs, which take the shape of wearable sculptures, large-scale print pieces, and sculptures, tackle modern concerns including survival, mental health, and climate change.

Landscapes, fish, and bodies of water are recurring themes in Alexa Hatanaka’s artworld work, collectively representing individual and collective experiences of hardship, resiliency, connection, and tremendous delight. A decade of community-based initiatives in the high Arctic and cooperative performances that use and reimagine kamiko—clothing produced from washi—are also part of Hatanaka’s approach.

Hatanaka is participating in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia by Koyo Kouoh. Her work has been exhibited at Kotaro Nukaga (Tokyo, JP), Harper’s Gallery (New York, USA), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, CA), Toronto Biennial of Art (Toronto, CA), Ino-cho Paper Museum (Kochi, Japan), and NADA (Miami, New York City). Recent acquisitions include the British Museum (London, UK), National Gallery Singapore (Singapore, SG), Dallas Art Museum (Dallas, USA), Material Art and Design Museum (New York City, USA), Shiga Prefecture Museum (Otsu, JP), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, CA) and Wellin Museum (Clinton, USA). Hatanaka is a 2025 artist-in-residence at Black Rock Senegal.

As part of the interview series, a conversation with Venice Biennale artists, Abirpothi, featuring Japanese-Canadian artist Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka. The artist discusses in detail her work and her presence in the Venice Biennale.

Q: Your work at the Venice Biennale seems to connect ecological instability with emotional and psychological states. How do you see climate change and mental health reflecting one another in your practice?

Alexa Hatanaka: When I was doing research, I discovered the possible effect of weather on developing bipolar disorder, a condition that I live with. It was possibly an adaptation to extreme weather shifts during the Pleistocene era, when it would have been useful to become “manic” when the weather was favourable, because in this state, one requires little sleep, becomes very creative, has an inflated sense of capability, and can easily draw connections between things. Then, when the weather was unfavourable, it would have been an effective adaptation to completely shut down and conserve energy. I am compelled by the theory because it points to neurodivergence as an embodied wisdom in service of group survival, developed from a deep attunement to nature rather than how it is seen now as an inherently individual problem. Now that we are experiencing another destabilising period of climate change, I wonder how neurodivergence may continue to hold important knowledge.

I started researching the evolutionary explanation for bipolar disorder in 2024, which led to the creation of “Instability”, which is showing in Venice. The drawings of ginkgo leaves nod to this theory, as ginkgo trees also survived the last ice age. I was only diagnosed in 2022, and it took until last year to arrive at a manageable threshold of fluctuation…so my better-informed observation of my somatic experiences continues to bring new discoveries. Part of the reason why I want to talk about this is that bipolar disorder is still a stigmatised and misunderstood condition. I think even the word is misleading, as there is such a wider spectrum of mood and symptoms than “bipolar” implies. In “Instability,” a white line created with gyotaku (non-toxic fish prints) cuts diagonally through the work, which is a line graph showing the increasing use of the word instability. It separates a region of the work that is lighter in colour from one that is darker, but both sections are densely constructed from a range of imagery and colours, visually bringing variety to these polarities. Also, “mental health” is misleading because so many of the symptoms affect the rest of your body. Initially, after diagnosis, I was not prepared to speak about my experience publicly, and previous to that, I was just in survival mode, and my internalised ableism was so strong, so this vein in my work is relatively new.

Although I am motivated to speak particularly about bipolar, I am finding that being very honest and vulnerable about mental health creates an invitation for others to do the same. Since in many parts of the world we unfortunately find ourselves in a mental health and loneliness epidemic, there are aspects of my experience with loneliness, anxiety, depression and climate anxiety that are very relatable.

Q: Across your installations, prints, wearable sculptures, and papermaking processes, there is a recurring tension between fragility and resilience. Why is this balance so central to your artistic language?

Alexa Hatanaka: I find the physical qualities of washi (Japanese paper) to lend themselves well to the theme of mental health in my work. Washi can be extremely thin, so it looks delicate; it can move even if you blow on it gently; my suspended works billow and sway when people walk by. People often think the work is fragile. However, because of the length and robustness of the plant fibres and the sheet-forming method, which creates many enmeshed thin layers of pulp, the paper is actually very strong. It is a natural metaphor for vulnerability and resilience. Additionally, natural dyes are not static; they change with time. Mostly, they will fade, but one of the dyes I use, called kakishibu, which is aged persimmons, actually darkens over time. As they are of the earth, it, of course, echoes the reality that things will shift and change over time. Life is inherently volatile, and I think people living with mental “illness” have to deal with this to a greater degree, which in turn builds resilience.

My two sculptures in the Biennale, “Immovable” and “Movable”, are made of sewn-together washi, simply formed around scrap cardboard and paper. They weigh almost nothing, yet they resemble heavy boulders. For me, they hold that tension of opposing states existing at once, which feels like a representation of how my emotional states can range so vastly. I deeply feel the reality that multiple truths can exist at once; there can be joy during great tragedy, there can be shreds of hope in despair that keep us going, and we are always living in multiplicity. I think the act of making holds an optimism, even if sceptical, or within the awareness or direct experience of crises. In some cases, things feel completely insurmountable, and my body is literally heavy, whereas at other times I am full of lightness, and my imagination is charged with possibility and ability. I think the fact that I remain enthralled by the appreciation and making of beautiful objects is hopeful. Both sculptures feature linocut prints based on my own photographs of Arctic snow, chiselled by strong winds that also resemble water and terrain. I find this can conjure the proverb present in several cultures, about how, over time, water can carve into stone, an allegory for persistence through challenges.

Q: You often describe bipolarity not simply as a diagnosis but as a heightened attunement to environmental shifts. How has this understanding transformed the way you approach art-making and the body’s relationship to nature?

Alexa Hatanaka: A diagnosis for an illness can only be such in relation to what is considered normal or favourable. In some ways, I can agree with the term disability in the sense that when I am really struggling, it actually does not seem to be related to or brought on by anything in particular; depression will just hit, and it is deeply uncomfortable. I can lose executive functioning, I get incredibly anxious in a way that makes daily life tasks feel impossible, and I get paranoid and trapped in my head.

In general, I feel most peaceful in nature; I find it very generative. When possible, I feel my work is a direct collaboration with nature. One of my favourite experiences of making was producing paper directly in the Niyodo river in Japan, led by my friend Tatsuyuki Kitaoka. Physically standing in and immersing my hands in the body of water that was suspending the pulp, drinking that same water…it really represents the body’s relationship to nature in my work. I LOVE those papers and use them sparingly in different pieces.

Another example was last year in Senegal. I was making handmade papers by pouring pulp onto a screen, using local rice straw, kozo from Kochi, Japan and Abaca from the Philippines. I also dyed some of the pulp with indigo. I was doing this on the rooftop so they dried in the sun, set against a huge vista of the ocean, which definitely influenced the work. For the first while I was there, I was hit with a low of depression. I was trying my best to surrender and be an observer of my symptoms, to try not to exacerbate the situation. I regularly went to the beach to crash around with the waves and surrender to the water’s power. This is much slower than I’d like, but I was trying a new way to lean into it. My mental health changes how I work. So I am learning which aspects of my practice I can achieve in different states so that I can continue making. In this way, my work really is a representation of how I am attuning to my current environment to soothe and work through changes in my inner landscape.

Q: In works such as Faultlines and Loneliness and Instability, you map collective emotional vocabularies. What does the rise of words like “loneliness” and “instability” reveal about the current global condition?

Alexa Hatanaka: There is only one body of work I plan to present: “Faultlines and Loneliness,” which is in the Biennale. These are made of hundreds of 9×9” handmade papers, linocut printed on and glued together with tiny paper tabs at the back, such that a little gap is maintained between papers in order to show their beautiful handmade deckle edge. Now that I have a cherished relationship with Tatsuyuki Kitaoka, a master papermaker in Kochi, Japan, in the region of Tosa Washi, he makes these papers for me from local kozo (a mulberry plant), which he harvests in the valleys, and through immense labour transforms its inner bast fibres into pulp and finally paper.

These artworks involve blocking half of some of the sheets while printing, which connects to form a graphic line across the work. These began as ways to draw maps moving across time and space, between places of significance. I use this methodology to chart the rise in prevalence of pathologised words. “Faultlines and Loneliness” is a work from 2024, made after a very destabilising experience that left me feeling lonely and anxious. I have generally been interested in making works about mental health as invitations to conversation, so having these works in an exhibition at the scale of the Biennale is a dream come true.

In my conversations with viewers, I find “loneliness” resonates a lot. It is a known fact that there is a loneliness epidemic in many places in the world, but particularly in North America. Loneliness can be a literal isolation from others, but it can also be the isolation of not being able to connect with others because you cannot embody your full, authentic self. I have experienced both. It reveals that the way we are required to live, the emphasis on productivity and individuality, and the dissolution of places to gather and nurture community create loneliness. On a more hopeful note, I think the prevalence of these words also means we are talking about it more. This isn’t the case globally, of course. For example, I work a lot in Japan and mental health is still way more stigmatised there, to the point people have written to me privately to express their isolation.

Also, the earth, life events – everything is inherently unstable, so the idea we are sold that we can somehow control outcomes is simply not true. I think one example of a collective awakening to this was COVID. I think people with persistent mental health conditions are and were in a better position to weather these events, as we cannot help but be aware that things are unstable, we have to constantly find ways to cope through and be brave. For more neurotypical folks, COVID brought about a lack of control and isolation that was new and scary.

Q: Your Biennale presentation includes Susceptibility to Gravity, inspired by koinobori carp flags. Why did the symbolism of fish swimming against strong currents feel important to bring to Venice at this historical moment?

Alexa Hatanaka: “Susceptibility to gravity” is the installation of seven 5×10-foot flags lining the walkway up to the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. I once took a class for people with bipolar, and “susceptibility to gravity” was how the teacher described how one can measure their level of depression. I LOVE this definition as it is equal parts poetic and literal. In severe depression, being heavy isn’t a metaphor; it is a literal challenge to move at all. In this case, of course, the flags are light and fly freely. While my distinctive imagery is present, gesturing to my overall concepts and concerns, including climate change, I wanted this work to be more lively and bright, as this multiplicity felt right for “In Minor Keys.” As Koyo wrote, “Because, though often lost in the anxious cacophony of the present chaos raging through the world, the music continues. The songs of those producing beauty in spite of tragedy, the tunes of the fugitives recovering from the ruins, the harmonies of those repairing wounds and worlds.”

The allegory of a fish jumping up a waterfall for 100 years, only to be transformed into a golden dragon, resonates with me. It feels that it requires a blind faith that there is another, better reality, if only we can persist and keep trying. The flags are experienced like a procession, moving forward collectively. I tend to bring distant geographies into my work, gesturing to our interconnectedness, and I am also thinking about the intimate human connection of our inner worlds – so situating this work in Venice, in a new place, but also with so many visitors, feels like an extension of that.

The flags are very active in the wind. The winds in Venice are increasing due to climate change, so I find the elements’ interaction with the artwork to activate the climate concerns in my work. Venice is also affected by sea-level rise. The gyotaku prints (fish prints) also connote water and movement unrestricted by borders. While my distinctive linocut prints, also featured on the flags, are based on my photos of wind-chiselled snow in the Arctic, they naturally connote water as well. For me, these points include melting polar ice, our interconnection through water, and the fact that rising sea levels from ice melt affect coastal communities globally, including Venice.

Q: Washi papermaking runs throughout your practice as both material and philosophy. What does it mean to sustain an endangered craft tradition while also pushing it into contemporary and transnational forms?

Alexa Hatanaka: Washi literally translates to “Japanese paper,” but it stems from Korean and Chinese papermaking, and each version of traditional paper is specific to the environmental conditions of each place. Therefore, traditional papermaking is a regionally specific craft that reflects specific land and water, and is not bound to nations.

I want to be part of the collective effort to preserve traditional papermaking because it represents a way of being, in tune with nature, within the earth’s capacity. It isn’t just sustainable; kozo harvesting also maintains a healthy ecosystem. Traditional craft-making requires an embodied awareness that can only be cultivated through repeated practice. It requires tuning into one’s senses. In papermaking, you have to feel the tension of the water, you have to engage muscles throughout your body to control the movement of the pulp back and forth across the sugeta (frame), you have to hear the viscosity of the water when adding neri, a thickening agent.

We need to be attuned to our bodies, which takes practice. The majority of the world is becoming increasingly distant from inhabiting their own bodies. Industrial papermaking automates a process that completely lives within the body. Our bodies are very wise. When it comes to mental health in broader strokes, to how the majority of the population will experience it, the body gives us the signals, but we have to know how to listen for them. Symptoms are not random; they are telling us there is a problem. The issue is often that the problems causing distress are massive structural issues that are difficult to solve. The main reason why mental health conditions are cast as bad is that they are not in the service of capitalism.

There is so much wisdom and heart tucked away in communities carrying forward craft traditions. People convene and quietly protest; they are guided by soulful care, they uphold the natural world and communal support structures. There is a different rubric for living that isn’t dictated by profits and maxing out time. These ways of being are marginalised or ignored, yet, in terms of ecology and collective survival, are the people we need to look to. I am extremely fortunate to have learned from the family and team at Kashiki Seishi, a seventh-generation washi mill in Japan, where I worked in residence, learning to harvest, prepare bark and make washi. It is a great honour that they let me use their archive of vintage washi from past generations. All of the washi I use is from their archive, some of it even 50 years old. They are really the ones carrying it forward, but hopefully, creating work with the washi is part of keeping it relevant and global.

I hope, in my small way, to draw attention to and appreciation for these “small” but mighty forms of resistance and the millennia of embodied knowledge that are more important than ever. Very simply, too, washi and other traditional papers like hanji have so many uses – they are insulating, breathable, light yet durable, renewable, suitable for home interiors and clothing, making them practical to retain and repurpose.

I think there is a growing desire for things that are visibly created directly with the human body. Even in art-making, there is such pressure to be super productive and everywhere at once. But there is no replacement for slow processes, and engaging in them is in direct defiance of that pressure. I think we need to reclaim our agency in the ways that we can.

Lastly, it is most often overlooked that ancient practices like papermaking or weaving are also technologies. There is just an overemphasis on the new. Historical gyotaku prints are actually used today to study fish populations, showing that traditions are not irrelevant. In my works, I used other processes that also developed through a relationship to nature, including indigo and kakishibu (aged persimmon) dying. Kakishibu is naturally waterproof and was previously used for weatherproofing gear and fishing implements; again, very practical.

Q: Your work frequently emerges from long-term collaborations with communities in Kinngait, Nunavut. How has Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, or Inuit generational wisdom, reshaped your understanding of survival, ecology, and art?

Alexa Hatanaka: I am very lucky to have spent much of my time in Nunavut, mostly in Kinngait (a community of about 1,400 people on Baffin Island known for the arts) between 2010 and 2021. I was initially invited to paint murals and to participate in a printmaking residency, and, through growing relationships, emerged in big, community-wide, intergenerational collaborative projects for and with youth. I learned so much from my Inuit friends there, and from spending time hiking, skiing, traversing the landscape, picking berries in the summer, making art together, and learning how to sew parkas and mitts. As part of collective projects, we would go out with groups of youth led by Inuit Elders who had such vivid memories for storytelling, which would happen alongside getting pulled in qamutiit (sleds) behind snowmobiles to fishing spots, drilling holes and laying down on our bellies to look down the holes and jig for fish, sliding down snowy hills, and eating snacks and drinking tea from a shared thermos.

This is a culture within which there are no contained “back yards”. Kids carve pathways, any which way they find shortcuts, packing the snow beneath their feet, collectively building passageways around the community. There is a strong connection between people, land, and animals. Food is shared, doors are open. There is a joke that when a knock on the door is heard, you know it’s a foreigner. The movement of the animals is not beholden to a 9-5 workday. There is such a strong connection to the land. I remember when I did my residency at the printshop in Kinngait, on the coffee breaks, everyone would sit, often in quiet, staring out to the bay. The depth of knowledge required to navigate and sustain in this environment is so staggering that I deeply respect it. The level of sensitivity and patience involved is incredible…waiting for fish, waiting for seals, staying poised and alert. Climate change is threatening this capability, as routes to hunting grounds melt too early, for example, and the accumulated and passed-down knowledge needs to be revised to account for the change. This was the first place I witnessed climate change so acutely. It is so easy to disassociate from it, or really just not have an imagination for it if you don’t live in the most vulnerable places. I also visited an iron mine further north in Nunavut, and ended up using the iron dust to make printmaking ink. Seeing the accumulated red dust on the snow collect into a deep hole is a visceral understanding of the impacts of extraction.

I grew up in Toronto, so I thought of nature as a place you visited. I learned so much about caring for nature, which we are indeed a part of all the time. The vastness of the tundra is gorgeous and humbling in such a healthy way. The snowdrifts that I often depict in my prints can also be used to navigate, if one holds traditional knowledge. Before learning about things like this, I would have never related to nature as a possible way to become “legible” to me for my own sustenance and survival. I had never felt part of a community before being in Kinngait; it is a level of mutual care I had never experienced that profoundly changed my life.

No one does anything alone; collective projects bring that into sharp focus and distance you from the assumed, or predominantly societally valued, need for individual authorship – there is a greater guiding force. It means we can tell a story together that would never be as specific and meaningful if done alone. Humans are relational beings. For most of my life, I was painfully shy and socially anxious (before being diagnosed and treated for bipolar disorder in 2022), and art provided me a pathway to be with people.

Ashoona Ashoona and I had worked together on the youth projects in Kinngait, and when we made our artwork together in 2021, “Uummatima tillirninga, I can feel my heart beat,” we were able to continue our mentorship of young artists, as part of our process was hiring youth to print with us. There’s lots of laughter, bonding, sharing, and being. Working with anyone, including youth, is a reciprocal learning process and an irreplaceably challenging and fulfilling experience; it provides a framework for getting to know each other and expands how we see the world.

Q: Many of your works blur distinctions between internal and external landscapes—between emotional turbulence and environmental catastrophe. Are you suggesting that human psychology itself is ecological?

Alexa Hatanaka: Both “Faultlines and Loneliness” and “Instability” make reference to real and metaphorical earthquakes. Both include graphic lines that chart the rise of the use of pathologised words, “loneliness” and “instability” respectively. Our inner landscapes become enmeshed with the volatility of our environment, represented in the linocut prints that ripple across the works.

“Instability” most pointedly refers to the evolutionary theory of bipolarity. Within it, there are visual references and physical manifestations of a time when I was navigating the confluence of bipolar depression at the same time that a dear friend took their own life. At that time, I discovered that if I’m depressed (not too depressed, because in those cases I lose executive functioning), I may not have the capacity for ambitious construction, but I can create repetitive ink drawings. It is a huge challenge to piece together something that requires more ideation, problem-solving, and trust, such as “Instability.” The ability to continue making is soothing for me. Not that it makes me feel better, but if I cease to be able to create, it throws me into an additional anxiety spiral. I made many ink drawings of falling or floating ginkgo leaves. Gingko trees also survived the last ice age, giving a nod to the bipolar evolutionary theory. While I was in Senegal and in a moment of depression, I recalled the role of ink drawing, so I documented the rope I found on the beach with many ink drawings.

Q: In exhibitions like Patience and Persistence, slowness, repetition, and embodied labour become almost political gestures. How do you see craft-based practices resisting capitalist ideas of speed, productivity, and extraction?

Alexa Hatanaka: Patience and Persistence brought together my experiences of learning about traditional paper in both Kochi, Japan, and various parts of Northern Vietnam. This included short documentaries that captured that experience and the stories of paper in the words of the papermakers themselves. These are created by my friend and collaborator Johnny Nghiem. Because traditional papermaking is disappearing due to industrialisation and globalism fuelled by capitalist pursuit, the continuity of traditional practices is a direct form of resistance. It is very niche now and not economically stable. In Japan, the production has become significantly more difficult because farmers who used to do half of the process are now too elderly, with no replacements. This means that those carrying forward papermaking are doing everything from harvesting and maintaining the plants to creating the finished paper. Therefore, it is truly sustained by care and respect for tradition and practices aligned with nature. There is nothing harmful about the paper’s production, and it could be returned to the river and merge back into the landscape. This means one’s motivation and livelihood aren’t driven by the pursuit of accumulating wealth, but rather by upholding something greater than themselves. The virtue of the process isn’t in maximising profits or accelerating speed, but in aiming for the highest quality and in respecting the land and water that provide the material.

In Vietnam, we discovered that while traditional paper was used by some students and contemporary artists, it is much more at risk than paper made for spiritual practice. In this case, the continuity of the craft also upholds a culture that emphasises spirituality, and its production serves a communal, not individual, benefit.

In the Western world, we are outsourcing what used to be provided by community structures and intergenerational care to services we pay for. This is precarious on multiple levels. I think craft-based practices offer beautiful examples of how to reengage with one another, reorient away from individual pursuits, and slow down.

Q: Your practice moves across Japan, Vietnam, Nunavut, Fogo Island, Toronto, and Venice. How does diasporic movement influence your understanding of belonging, especially as a Japanese-Canadian artist working across multiple geographies?

Alexa Hatanaka: My practice is actually more global than that, but these are some of the places that have made a more recent, significant impact and are interesting to intersect with. The flags I made, “Susceptibility to gravity”, are very active in the wind. The winds in Venice are increasing due to climate change, so I find the element of wind interacting with the artwork to activate the climate concerns in my work. Venice is also affected by sea-level rise. Within my work, there are elements from multiple geographies and times; I have produced parts of them in different locations, and through the materials, the artwork reaches back millennia, and through the upcycling of my paper scraps, my artworks hold my personal history as well. Our environment has changed drastically in those time spans. The gyotaku prints (fish prints) connote water and movement unrestricted by borders. While the linocut prints are based on my photos of wind-chiselled snow in the Arctic, they naturally connote water as well. I think these points are melting polar ice, our interconnection through water, and the fact that rising sea levels from ice melt affect coastal communities globally, including Venice. In this way, the work is expanding its geographic connections.

I wanted to have a relationship to the material, so I chose a Canadian-made fabric called “Commander,” which I learned how to sew into parkas during my time in Nunavut. As my work continues to be influenced by my experiences there, including thinking about the embodied and handed-down knowledge derived from sensitive attunement to nature, it made sense to use a material that enables one to survive in the elements for fishing, hunting, or simply enjoying the outdoors in extreme cold. I also find sewing empowering, enabling me to create garments that protect or adorn our bodies.

I am the third-generation Japanese, Sansei, through my grandmother, and fourth-generation, yonsei, through my grandfather. Therefore, as a diasporic person, I have been quite removed from my origins. I am also of mixed heritage; my mom is British, German, and French-Canadian, which adds another layer to the question of belonging. When I was younger, I thought more about belonging and feared I would never feel it. Although I was really included in Kinngait, I still felt I would always be an outsider, as well as in Japan, even though I have shared ancestry. Then, on top of that, I visit many places where I don’t speak the language, and I am learning the culture. In more recent times, I have actually embraced not belonging anywhere in particular. I feel adaptable and an observer, and I feel it is simply my truth. Letting that go is freeing and perhaps orients me more towards connectivity than noticing differences.

Q: Gyotaku, the traditional printing technique using real fish, carries both personal and ancestral significance in your work. What attracts you to practices that function simultaneously as art, documentation, and ecological memory?

Alexa Hatanaka: I learned gyotaku, non-toxic printing of real fish, in 2019 just by watching a few YouTube videos and trial and error. Importantly, it is non-toxic, so I eat the fish afterwards. It is a simple technique, but it requires great finesse to master. I am, however, more interested in imperfect impressions that embrace the unruliness of watery ink. Originally, historical gyotaku prints were simply used to capture the form of the fish to record the size of catches, before photography. It evolved into an art form and has now come full circle, informing scientists’ research on fish populations. I am drawn to how some art practices are rooted in everyday, practical activities. My gyotaku prints are records of my personal history and of those fish, which will exist in posterity. It isn’t a gesture or an interpretation; it is an accurate timestamp.

When I travel to places on the water, I always practice gyotaku, and those prints will make their way into large works that combine pieces of paper treated in various ways from different times and places. For example, last year I was lucky to be at the Black Rock residency in Dakar. There I went fishing, caught some fish, and after we ate them as sashimi. I also bought fish from the market to print. These prints made it into works I produced in Toronto and New York. Although I didn’t grow up fishing, my great-grandfather was a fisherman for a livelihood, as was common among Japanese Canadians, and my grandfather was an avid recreational fisher. In adulthood, I have had many significant experiences. Fishing was the first way I experienced going out into the natural world to find food for my own sustenance, which is transformative and so important for reconnecting with. I think it increases necessary reverence for nature and ingrains the reality that we are part of the ecosystem, too.

Q: Several of your projects revisit earthquakes, floods, aftershocks, and rising waters. Do you see natural disasters in your work as metaphors for personal upheaval, or as reminders that the planet itself is speaking back to us?

Alexa Hatanaka:  The work “Namazu,” in the Biennale, features the shape of a fish made from hundreds of scraps of washi and references Japanese mythology about an underground catfish that thrashes about, causing earthquakes. I had been thinking about earthquakes and tsunamis as metaphors for abrupt, difficult life events we have to navigate, including their aftershocks. I discovered this story years into practising gyotaku and creating fish-shaped sculptures, and I was really excited to find a mythology that connected the two. Additionally, this story emerges from the true account of an eel fisherman who noticed catfish were active before an earthquake; the fish can sense the tremors. This ties into my interest in embodied knowledge, honed in attunement to nature for our survival.

I am also thinking about these disasters as their growing frequency is not “natural.” In Japan, people live with the constant looming threat of earthquakes. I have been aware of the possibility as a visitor. I recently experienced a typhoon in the Philippines as well, again, a normal occurrence for locals. The planet is definitely speaking back to us.

Earthquakes came to me as a metaphor during a time of major personal upheaval in 2020. I left a long-term abusive relationship at the outset of COVID, all of my projects were cancelled, and I had already given up my apartment because they were travelling projects. Over those couple of years, the bipolar disorder also expressed itself more intensely, so that it was finally diagnosed. I restarted every aspect of my life, including, by default, having space to create personal artwork, as I couldn’t travel to Nunavut or elsewhere. This transition was super important. I had been feeling a yearning to make my own work, but always deprioritised it in favour of community projects. I had to sort through my storage unit,, which housed years of materials and artworks that had been tucked away. I found old woodblock prints I had made in Nanjing, China, while studying there in 2011. At the time, I was watching the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake (Fukushima disaster) unfold on TV in the cafeteria, and it deeply impacted me, so I translated that into my print work. I ended up reprinting the blocks and combining them with years-old prints into a sewn paper hazmat suit that fits my body. In this way, the hazmat was something to protect against unseen threats like poisoning, COVID, or attacks on my psyche or emotions. It led me to reflect on the other earthquake that affected me, which is the Great Kanto Earthquake that caused my grandmother and great-grandparents to move to Canada.

Q: Your installations often include wearable sculptures activated through dance, performance, or movement. Why is the living body so important in completing your artworks?

Alexa Hatanaka: When I collaboratively created the dance, titled “Unchanging and changing and changing,” I had my mind and body opened up to how ideas and the aching need for release could be brought out in sound and movement, along with my costumes. I had to think about how the costumes could accentuate movement and storytelling. I took Taiko drumming classes to prepare for the creation, although I did not drum in the performance. The feeling of taking up space with sound and of creating it collectively was invigorating for me, something so fundamental to being human. I never would have experienced this if not for the project. The way the drummers Jody Chan and Wy Joung Kou translated the arch of the story into percussion and arm movement was so exciting; it is endlessly generative to make with others, and in this case, I think this work truly needed to take the form of performance, which I couldn’t do alone.

I find that I make things, and then later on, I understand more why I may have made certain decisions. For example, between 2019 and 2023, I was really interested in making wearable sculptures. The most obvious reason to me at the time was that it really demonstrates the durability and capability of washi and other papers. Most of the wearables fit my body, but I also made some for musicians and performers. I like the idea that the artwork then held the memory and energy of those live expressions and connection with audiences. More recently, though, I realised that making wearables achieved two very important things for me at the time. In that time period, I was suffering mentally, and then I was working through the aftermath of the aforementioned abusive relationship…once the floodgates opened, I also began to mourn other losses that I had not addressed over the years. Many of these wearables were protective gear: hazmat suits, workers’ uniforms, and a reference to traditional rain protective garments. At the same time, I started making wearables intended to be activated, danced into, fun outfits to wear within a reorientation to pleasure — to release grief, to encourage connection, for courage, joy, expression. In hindsight, I see now that I needed to find a way to move forward while integrating all the experiences I wanted to erase. But erasing isn’t an option; it’s all held in the body. So, in moving my body, caring for myself, and seeking enjoyment, it makes sense that I was making things for me to wear, constructed from treated papers spanning 2009 to the present.

The wearables made for musicians and performers necessarily meant I was collaborating and relating to new people. Coming out of loneliness and shame, it was so important to find new community and friendships and to do the hard work of discovering the adjacent possibilities around me. The creation of the dance “Unchanging and changing and changing” allowed me to reconnect with my Japanese-Canadian community. Also, the end of the dance featured an invitation for the audience to join a folk dance performed in a circular formation. The dance and costumes also included references to earthquakes/ tsunamis/ aftershocks as metaphors. The 2019/2020 version of me could never have imagined the 2023 me, connected to so many wonderful people who participated. It was a massive, exuberant life shift. In this way, the concepts for the work, of growth through challenge and healing through human connection, were enacted through the process of making and performing, on top of being represented in the forms, prints and drawings incorporated into the costumes. Art can be a vehicle for understanding what I need and finding that nourishment.

Finally, my suspended works move as people walk past because they are so light. Because of the volume of visitors, it is sustaining their movement more than usual. I like how the movement reveals the work’s materiality and connection to the visitors’ bodies – the work comes alive and animates in response to people. For me, it also creates a sense that the ideas, materials and processes are not static.

Q: Much of your work seems to challenge Western ideas about stability, permanence, and control. Are you proposing uncertainty, vulnerability, and adaptation as alternative ways of living in the world?

Alexa Hatanaka: I think uncertainty, vulnerability and adaptation are the only ways to live in the world. I often think of the Japanese phrase, closely associated with Japanese Canadians, “shikata ga nai” or “shoganai,” both meaning “it cannot be helped.” In the Western world, this may be interpreted as weakness or giving up, an unwillingness to fight for what one wants. However, it is derived from Buddhist philosophy to acknowledge our lack of control and the impermanence of everything. Acceptance of unwanted happenstance is really hard, but necessary to move forward and identify what one can do, where we have agency. This phrase can be applied to very simple scenarios, like accidentally breaking something, to very serious occurrences, like how the term is closely linked to the wrongful internment and dispossession of Japanese-Canadians and Japanese-Americans in the Second World War. I have also pointedly made text-based, handmade paper artworks using these terms.

To make my word-mapping work, I look to Google Dictionary, which also provides a graph showing the increase in these pathologised words since the 1800s. To me, this means within the artwork, the words – symptoms, experiences, emotions – are trapped in the western conception of mental health, which posits mental health as a problem of the individual. Other cultures and traditions would see someone struggling as a communal struggle to be addressed as a group. There are many cultures within which there were originally no terms, for example, suicide or certain experiences of mental health. This was the case for Inuit, yet now suicide is a common word, reflecting the number of lives lost, including friends very close to me – these concepts and occurrences are directly linked to colonisation. Suicide is also more common in Japan, one major reason being economic structure and extreme corporate expectations influenced by the insertion of Western capitalism, and suicide has become more common in general, particularly in North America. I think it needs to be normalised to talk about because in fact the line between full participation in life and desperately wanting out is thinner than we like to think – I think ideating about suicide is so normal, there is so much stacked against us. The word “mapped” in my artworks is so far only in English. To me, this looks at how these symptoms and experiences are trapped in the Western conception of mental health. This approach places blame on the individual, rather than interrogating things like oppressive societal structures – it is not a coincidence that so many people are afflicted by mental struggles. With this comes shame. There is definitely a portion of people, like myself, who genuinely require medication, but for the most part, over-prescribing medication is the remedy given to force people back into the structures that are making them sick in the first place.

Q: As a queer Japanese-Canadian artist engaging with climate anxiety, intergenerational knowledge, and embodied mental health, what do you hope audiences at the Venice Biennale understand about the politics of care, survival, and interconnectedness in your work?

Alexa Hatanaka: I think disability justice has a long way to go, and it begins with awareness. I hope my work can help encourage curiosity and conversation, in pursuit of empathy and better care for each other. I think identity isn’t fixed, and we can change how we see ourselves every day.

Queerness, neurodivergence, being diasporic and of mixed heritage begets imagination. In my time getting to know how these parts of myself inform how I live in the world, one big thing for me is the amount of imagination involved. We aren’t stuck with only what we have inherited; we must use our imagination to figure out how we belong in the world, how we contribute, and how we love. I hope the audience can feel the level of care and time I pour into my work; it comes from my hands, my embodied experience of mental health, and my deep appreciation of generations of artisans, including the contemporaries I work with. It is slow, intuitive and sensitive. I hope people can see a bit of themselves in the work and in what I am thinking about, so they feel more connected. Hopefully, people feel inspired to learn from traditions, as they are crucial to our collective survival and ability to thrive.