Asaki Kajima was born and raised in Japan and now lives in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand.

Her experiences there as a young professional ‘coming of age’ and her complicated relationship with her homeland are strong influences in her work.

Asaki grew up in a family with a florist business established in 1929 just outside Tokyo, which serviced homes and businesses in the capital. As Japan’s economy boomed from 1986 to 1991, in an economic force known as ’The Bubble’, Asaki studied design and worked as a graphic designer in advertising. As her family business grew in response to The Bubble, she moved into a role there, combining her design skills with her knowledge of traditional and contemporary Japanese floristry.

The Bubble burst in 1991. Asaki’s family business, like so many others, collapsed. What followed in Japan for the rest of the nineties was known as ’The Lost Decade’ as the country floundered economically and then began the road to recovery. The loss of the family business, its effect on her parents and siblings, and the disappearance of the exciting, fast-paced life of Tokyo left Asaki looking to make sense of the world.

She moved to New Zealand and began her new life, at first bringing her signature style to the local florist scene, and then later moving into sculpture.

The New Zealand landscape and its unique biology is fascinating to Asaki - how things grow, the movement of natural organisms, and the connection between form and function in nature. All of this lends itself to her work, and led the development from floristry into sculpture. 

In 2017 acclaimed NZ sculptor Jeff Thomson wrote the following letter about Asaki and her work, in support of her efforts for a solo exhibition at Hastings City Art Gallery:

Touch This Earth Lightly is the title of a book on the Australian Architect Glenn Murcutt, (edited by Philip Drew). This title I believe sums up Asaki Kajima’s work to date. Words come to mind such as delicate, fragile, sensitive, lightness, gentleness, gracefulness, environment and ethereal.

Materials found in nature in combination with manmade materials are pivotal to her practice and it is the delicate and sensitive way she uses them that creates a powerful message.

As the judge in 2012 for the National Field Days Number 8 Wire Competition, at Art Post, (annex to the Waikato Museum), I awarded Asaki one of the three prizes up for grabs.

I was intrigued with her submitted sculpture, which combined natural material in the form of a tree branch, and manmade materials including entangled and entwined number 8 wire. Asaki brought them together into a 3-dimensional drawing, a free form non-figurative construction that showed she had a wonderful sensitivity to materials. The sculpture was delicately put together and had a mysterious, quality that kept bringing me back to it in an attempt to discover more about it.

Her work, all in one, was imaginative, thoughtful, experimental, playful and refreshing.

When looking at the greater body of Asaki’s work, the above qualities consistently come through, emphasising the fact that she is a serious, talented and committed artist whom is unafraid to experiment in pursuit of exploring personal and emotional ideas.

She has, and still is, developing her own unique visual language and this will continue to develop, the longer she works.

Asaki, as her work suggests is obviously aware of the aesthetics and sensibilities found in her country of birth, Japan, especially when considering the wider concept of ikebana- placement and arrangement – a disciplined Art Form where nature and humanity are brought together, steeped in a philosophy of developing closeness with nature.

I may well be wrong but to me, it feels as though she uses the concepts and philosophy mentioned above re Ikebana, and applies these in her own way, to working with materials found here in New Zealand or more precisely and importantly, found locally in the Hawkes Bay.

Asaki’s artwork is a product of a bi-cultural society, influenced by both her birth country and her adopted country – New Zealand.

-Jeff Thomson