Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka (b. 1988, Toronto, Canada) is a Japanese-Canadian, queer artist living with bipolar condition, all of which shape her practice. Working primarily with paper, she uses printmaking, ink drawing, natural dyeing, and sewing to engage historical paper processes and materials that both require and contribute to a clean environment. Recurring motifs of landscape, fish, and bodies of water speak to personal and collective experiences of struggle, resilience, connection, and radical joy, while her practice includes a decade of community-engaged projects in the high Arctic and collaborative performances that integrate and reinterpret kamiko, garments sewn from washi.
Hatanaka’s work is held in the collections of the British Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Material Art and Design Museum, Shiga Prefecture Museum, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Wellin Museum. She was a 2025 artist-in-residence at Black Rock Senegal.
Sustenance brings together prints, drawings, and textiles made across multiple places and years. A collograph mitten print from Kinngait, Nunavut uses a found, discarded mitten, while linocut prints depict Arctic snow formations. Rope ink drawings reference ropes found in Dakar during the artist’s Black Rock residency, alongside gyotaku prints made from real fish using a traditional Japanese, non-toxic printing method. The work also incorporates a repurposed sewn element made from archival washi paper from Kashiki Seishi in Japan’s Tosa region.