BIOGRAPHY
Fumiko Amano was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1968. She has been exploring various mediums to express herself since she was a child. She started taking piano lessons at three, and she was composing music by seven. By the age of ten, Amano was exploring poetry and ink drawings. In 1987, she attended Toyo Women's College in Tokyo as an English literature major and joined a theater club in school. At that time she was fascinated by contemporary theater directed by Yukio Ninagawa and Juro Kara (the most influential Japanese theater directors). This led Amano to move to the United States to study more about contemporary theatre arts.
Amano attended the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where she studied visual art, music recording, theater arts and performing arts for four and a half years. At age 23 she gave her first performance art piece, using a big mixed media painting (7' x 35') which was used as a musical score. She graduated from UWSP in 1993 with a BA in Art & Design-Painting/Printmaking. Soon after, she moved to San Francisco, where she started incorporating beat poetry, architecture, Japanese comics, dreams and sound into her paintings. In 1997, in search of a new environment to create sonic landscapes, Amano traveled extensively, first to Rio de Janeiro, then on to New York, Miami and Los Angeles, where she finally settled down.
In 2000, she attended California Design College in Los Angeles to study fashion. Inspired by designs from contemporary designers such as Rei Kawakubo, Hussein Chalayan, she started her own label called Unicode to create contemporary wearable art. She also started working on fabric-made installation art pieces, inspired by Ernest Neto's works.
In 2003, because of her passion for film, she started a monthly art film screening event at Art Share in downtown L.A. as a curator/organizer. In 2004, Amano helped curate the Tar Fest Short Film Festival and in 2006 she curated a film event for MOCA NIGHT VISION, in conjunction with Robert Rauschenberg: THE COMBINES. Los Angeles Magazine has dubbed her the 'culture vulture' of downtown Los Angeles (June 2004 issue) because of her devotion to the Downtown art community.
Over the past five years Amano has been working on several series of paintings, including: Dream Series (2002 & 2007), Dust Painting Series (2003), Water Music Series (2003), Live Painting Series (2003-current), Organic Series (2003-current), Downtown Series (2004-current), Pattern Series (2005), Atmospherics Series (2006), and Flower Form Series (2006-current). Her atmospheric paintings, created as visualizations of sound/dream/organic forms, have been exhibited in San Francisco, New York, L.A., Berlin, London, Spain and Korea. Her recent works were exhibited at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, LACMA Rental and Sales Gallery, MOCA and Murnau Art Gallery in Seville, Spain.
