Japanese Artist Ulala Imai Turns Her Kids’ Toys into Cuddly Paintings

In a quiet residential pocket of Japan’s Kanagawa Prefecture, about an hour southwest of Tokyo, Japanese painter Ulala Imai lives surrounded by architecture that evokes her past. She shares a newly built, tiered, and spacious home—elegant, minimalist, airy, and flooded with soft white light—with her husband and children. But just across the street stands the three-story home where she grew up, originally a U.S. military house purchased and redesigned by her father, Shingo Imai, a Western-style painter. Diagonally across is another single-story house where she and her family lived until last November—her home and studio for nine years. Much of her recent work was painted in its living room, often with her children playing beside her.

Next door to her current home is another building woven into her personal history: a tiny weathered house which her father rented as a young man, where Imai also spent part of her childhood. Today, that building serves as Imai’s studio. The space hums quietly with large canvases in various stages, and is adorned with painting equipment and everyday objects from her life, which she often portrays in her art. One of the most acclaimed figurative painters in Japan today, Imai’s international visibility is now growing—with works recently shown at Karma in New York and Art Basel Hong Kong, and others held in major collections including those at SFMOMA and the Dallas Museum of Art. At the same time, her inner world remains tightly rooted in home. The upcoming exhibition “CLOSE” at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, on view May 15th through July 12th, continues that trajectory, weaving in references to Shinto spirituality and childhood objects, family, care, and presence.

Imai’s rise, however, has been slow-burning. A graduate of the prestigious Tama Art University, she exhibited for years in Japan before gaining international momentum, which started at Paris Internationale in 2017, where she showed small paintings of buttered toast and fruit at Union Pacific’s booth. Her 2021 international solo debut exhibition, “AMAZING,” at Nonaka-Hill in Los Angeles coincided with the pandemic—a time she describes as creatively formative. Confined to the home that also served as her studio, she began to make work with what was immediately at hand. That inward-looking period, she said, helped shape her style and gave her the courage to pursue opportunities abroad.

In her Kanagawa studio, there’s a life-sized toy dog with only one ear—highly symbolic, given Imai’s hearing impairment—which is the subject of one of her new paintings. On one wall hangs a painting by her father. Imai is a third-generation artist, raised in a richly visual household, now married to contemporary painter Yu Nishimura (recently added to the roster of David Zwirner). For this creative couple, art is both heritage and living practice.

In this geographically tight, emotionally expansive stomping ground, Imai has carved out a singularly intimate practice. “Most of the motifs in my paintings come from my daily life within a small, one-and-a-half-kilometer radius. These are familiar scenes and objects,” she said. It’s a sensation she evokes in her current exhibition title “CLOSE”: “While it could bring to mind the image of a store closing, it holds a sense of warmth and intimacy for me.”

In her paintings, toys, food, household objects, and everyday rituals become the central actors in paintings that float between the real and the uncanny. To perceive Imai’s work is indeed to experience a kind of visual hush, rooted in how she perceives the world. “I was born with hearing loss,” she explained. “Because of that, I have no real sense of what sound is like for those with full hearing. Hearing aids are essential for me, but the digitally converted world they offer often feels fake. I’ve found it hard to trust—so I’ve come to rely even more on the visual world.”

Imai’s hearing impairment shapes her relationship to visual rhythm. “Even in silence, when I encounter a moment that moves me deeply, it resonates like a melody within me,” she says. “I don’t know the textbook definition of melody, but if my work can evoke a forgotten tune in someone’s heart, that makes me very happy.”

This reliance on vision isn’t just practical; it’s poetic. Her paintings often evoke the stillness of a room just after someone has left. They’re composed through a meticulous process of real-world arrangement—arranging scenes both inside and outside her home before translating them into paint on canvas. The results are both luminous and elusive: domestic scenes rendered with the psychological resonance of myth. “I want to paint something like a flickering candle,” she says, “which has no sound, but still moves and comforts the heart.”

That duality—stillness with an emotional undercurrent—runs throughout “CLOSE.” One painting, LOVERS (2025), is a large-scale work featuring Charlie Brown and Lucy (from the comic strip “Peanuts”) figurines perched in a tree just beyond her window. Later, I spotted the actual toys resting on a shelf in her spacious, open-plan living room. “The figures are stretched so large that they feel very close to the viewer,” Imai said. “But there is a clear boundary. They are in a world of their own, wrapped in the shade of the tree.” The figures’ gaze is soft and shared, angled upward in the same direction.

“We live in an era filled with contradictions and overwhelming information, where uncertainty is constant,” she continued. “In such times, I want to continue painting in a way that communicates my feelings as honestly and clearly as possible—to express something simple and heartfelt, something that resonates directly with the viewer.”

Motherhood also reshaped her approach to art-making. “After my first child was born, I was trying to figure out how to keep creating while caring for a baby,” she recalled. “During naps, I would gather whatever objects I had around me—baby dolls, scallions from the fridge, a glass of grape juice—and start setting up still lifes on the dining table. Sometimes I’d even stick an Ultraman figure into a potato,” she said, referring to the Japanese science fiction character. Her husband, being a painter himself, would return from work and quietly join in. “Even if the setup looked surreal, he helped me tweak the composition until it felt just right,” she added. “That became the foundation of my current practice.”

What might read on the surface as domestic simplicity—teddy bears or cherries in a bowl—reveals deeper psychological registers under Imai’s brush. These objects are neither strictly symbolic nor entirely literal. They hum with something else: an aura of care, of memory, of minor griefs and small joys.

Another new painting, CONEY ISLAND (2025), was inspired by a visit to New York. It shows two teddy bears in bathrobes seated quietly on a deserted winter beach, a shuttered amusement park in the distance. The image evokes a melancholic stillness—a sense of narrative suspended. Amusement parks, after all, only come alive when animated by play—their emptiness here implies something more uneasy, a tension between peace and disquiet. The bears themselves appear inwardly animated, caught in silent dialogue or reverie.

This ambiguity is part of what gives Imai’s work such staying power: specific but not didactic, saturated with feeling but not too sentimental. “Living with my family, each of whom has different personalities and preferences, naturally brings about lifestyle changes as my children grow,” she said. “These shifts become a steady source of creative nourishment.”