Khabarovsk, Russia

These works grew out of Akeyama’s journeys to Siberia from 1999 onward, where women, families, solitary guardians, and northern landscapes gradually gave shape to a vision of life marked by cold, distance, and the far edge of habitation.

From a 2022 Interview
Edited for clarity from the original spoken Japanese.

When I went to Khabarovsk, I first felt the Russian land. It was different from the desert, but it had the same vastness, a landscape of horizons.

The people living there seemed modest, as if their lives were close to the land. As I returned again and again, I gradually encountered people who could become models, and the paintings began to take form.

Families and Figures

Portraits and Solitary Figures

Landscapes

The Texture of Presence

What first draws attention in these paintings may be the remoteness of Siberia, but what holds it is something quieter: the felt atmosphere of lives lived at the edge. Many of the works turn to women living in that northern region, perhaps because in their clothing, composure, and everyday bearing Akeyama found a particularly concentrated image of life shaped by cold, distance, waiting, and nearness to the land.

At the same time, the paintings are drawn to texture — fur, patterned cloth, weathered skin, frost, cloud, dim light, worn surfaces. In the figure paintings, the environment is sensed not simply as setting, but as something entering the figure itself; in the landscapes, weather and light become presences in their own right. In that sense, the attraction to remoteness and the attraction to texture are not separate concerns: both are ways of approaching how life is actually felt in such a place.

The force of the series may lie in that double attention, through which a distant region comes into view not as spectacle, but as a human atmosphere rendered materially present.

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