Los Angeles–based performance artist Ei Arakawa-Nash will represent Japan at the 2026 Venice Biennale, the Japan Foundation announced Thursday. A curator has not been announced yet.
For the Pavilion, Arakawa-Nash will create a new installation that, according to the announcement, will explore his perspective as a queer parent of newborn twins in order to “dissect nationalism and patriarchy.”
“I thought I would never have a chance to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale after I gave up my Japanese nationality a few years ago … Now, my husband and I busily raise two children who are new parts of the Asian diasporic community in Los Angeles,” Arakawa-Nash said in the announcement.
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“Recently, we re-watched the 1962 film Being Two Isn’t Easy written by Natto Wada. Her script will be a reference point for my performative engagement at the Japan Pavilion in 2026.”
Active since the early 2000s, Arakawa-Nash has long created performance works that draw on the 1950s and ’60s avant garde, particularly drawing on the post-war Japanese Gutai movement, Tokyo Fluxus, Viennese Actionism, and Happenings. Often his performances are seemingly improvised and involve collaborations with other artists or even audience members in ways that blur the lines between the three.
In 2021, for example, Arakawa staged Mega Please Draw Freely at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, in which museum-goers were allowed to sketch and draw on the hall’s floor. In July and August of that year, the performance marked the first time that many had been able to enter the museum since London’s third Covid lockdown. That work specifically draws on Gutai artist Yoshihara Jirō’s Please Draw Freely (1956), in which Jirō invited children to collaborate and draw on board staged outside. Arakawa’s version expanded the work to monumental scale.
Arakawa-Nash is currently a professor in the Graduate Art program at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. His most recent exhibition, “Paintings are Popstars,” held at the National Art Center Tokyo last fall, was his first solo exhibition in Asia.
In 2016, ARTnews followed Arakawa-Nash as he worked on his musical How to DISappear in America to talk about why the genre appealed to him.
Japan is the latest among a number of countries to announce its pavilion presentation in advance of the 2026 Venice Biennale.