The world of Ayano Oki emerged alongside the genre known as bijinga, and it draws us towards a deeply erotic gaze.

Painted in colour laid on as roughly as spilled coffee, her women receive men at the edge of the senses, and they throw their gaze back out at us from the other side of the picture, wanting something deeper and stronger.

In a Japanese figure-painting scene that goes on rendering the surface of women with hard skin, the fierceness she keeps hidden is singular.

Her painterly view — never letting go of sensuality, of human existence, or of an affection for and a questioning of the being of things themselves — produces a tension that only art can hold. She might be called a Japanese Egon Schiele, yet her sensuality lacks Schiele's European compulsion; it seems instead to point towards a very Japanese, optimistic longing for happiness.