ABOUT
Emily Hana (b. 1990, Tokyo) is an Australian multidisciplinary artist based in London. She moved to the UK in 2016 to pursue a career in the arts, working for several years as a senior printmaker at Thumbprint Editions, where she produced work for some of the world’s leading contemporary artists. This experience laid the foundation for her understanding of composition, colour, and technical precision.
During the pandemic, while on furlough, she began developing her own painting practice. What started as quiet experimentation gradually evolved into a distinct sculptural style. Unable to afford traditional materials, she turned to the streets of London, collecting discarded wood and teaching herself woodwork, laying the groundwork for her current approach to painting as a physical, constructed medium.
Her recent solo exhibitions include Simulacrum at Red Eight Gallery and The Hugging Machine at Cicek Gallery, both in London in 2025. In 2026, she exhibited in ArtEvol: A View from Everywhere, organised by London Art Collective at Saatchi Gallery, and at Fair Play Art Fair. Her work was also included in (UN)SEEN and What's Left | What's Gone at Hypha Studios. She was also in the RBA Rising Stars show in 2026.
Artist Statement
My work is driven by a fascination with perception, introspection, and the fractured self. I create sculptural paintings that resist comprehension from a single perspective, surfaces that shift and distort as the viewer moves, requiring active engagement.
I’m particularly drawn to the tension between intimacy and distance, clarity and distortion. Whether exploring loneliness, identity, or the nature of connection, my work aims to reflect the psychological landscapes we navigate daily, often layered, fragmented, and unresolved.
I build my canvases using discarded materials: offcuts, broken wood, and found fragments. This method emerged from necessity, but it’s become central to my process, reclaiming what was unwanted and giving it new value. In that way, each piece is a meditation on reconstruction, both emotional and material.
At its core, my practice is about making sense of disconnection. It’s about revealing what lies beneath the surface, embracing the mess of becoming, and inviting viewers to confront their own shadow selves through the distortions and alignments that emerge.
Series Statement: The Hugging Machine
The Hugging Machine is a deeply personal exploration of loneliness, artificial intimacy, and the longing for touch. The series began with a memory from my childhood, constructing a hugging machine from pillows and yellow marigold gloves to comfort myself in the absence of human contact.
That early act became the foundation for a body of work that investigates skin hunger- the psychological and physical effects of touch deprivation. In these paintings, human figures engage with fabricated, machine-like forms that offer the illusion of comfort, but fall short of real connection. The series is a meditation on artificial intimacy, the ways we soothe ourselves in isolation, and a reimagining of how care and closeness might be approached when physical connection is absent.
The works are intimate, intrusive, and quietly uncanny. They ask what happens when we attempt to manufacture closeness, and how we navigate emotional distance in an increasingly disconnected world. Yet beneath the tension, I hope the work also carries a sense of tenderness, a quiet hopefulness that comfort can still be found, even in unconventional forms.
The marigold gloves remain a recurring symbol in my practice: sterile, mediated, and slightly absurd, an echo of touch rather than the real thing. In contrast, hands appear as central figures in my mirror series. Where gloves represent separation, hands are our first and most immediate tool of connection. We reach before we speak; we touch before we fully understand. In this way, hands become a metaphor for the desire to grasp, to hold, to know, and ultimately, to be known.
Series Statement: Simulacrum
Simulacrum explores the fluidity of identity and the illusions we build around the self. Drawing on Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacrum, a copy with no original, this series investigates how perception is shaped by internal conflict, external influence, and subconscious distortion.
Each work is built on a sculptural, fragmented canvas that aligns into a coherent image only from one precise angle. From other perspectives, the image is disjointed, incomplete, or warped, mirroring how self-understanding is always partial and in flux.
These pieces examine the "shadow self", the parts of identity we suppress or hide. By requiring physical movement and shifting viewpoints, the viewer is invited to engage with complexity, to confront discomfort, and to consider how much of what we see is a projection.
Constructed from found and unwanted materials, Simulacrum continues my ongoing process of turning fragmentation into form, distortion into clarity, and introspection into structure.
Available works can be viewed in the shop. For commissions and enquiries, please contact emilyhanaj@gmail.com.
Timeline
2026 October 15-18 - Fair Play Art Fair, One Marylebone, London
2026 October - ArtEvol: A View from Everywhere, London Art Collective, Saatchi Gallery, London
2026 April 10-May 16 - (UN)SEEN, Hypha x Eastern City Studios, 130 Fenchurch Street, London, curated by Zoë Goetzmann
2026 January 30-March 7 - What's Left | What's Gone, Hypha Gallery 3, No.1 Poultry, London, curated by Lucia Jurikova and Jagoda Witkowska
2026 - RBA Rising Stars group show
2025 October 16-22 - The Hugging Machine, Cicek Gallery, London, solo exhibition curated by Berfin Cicek
2025 July - Summer Contemporary, British Pears Arts, Snape Maltings
2025 April -Royal British arts Rising stars exhibition- Royal overseas League Mayfair
2025 March-June - Red eight gallery, Bank - solo
2024 September- finalist Dubel Prize
2024 April- Apocalyptic changes of state- Brushes With Greatness- Shoreditch
2024 April- June - RBA Rising Stars group show, Royal Over Seas League, Mayfair
2024- Shortlisted Royal British Arts Rome scholarship
2023 April- June - RBA Rising Stars group show, Royal Over Seas League, Mayfair
2023 March - Affordable Art Fair , Art Friend
2023- Shortlisted Royal British Arts Rome scholarship
2022 June - British Painting 3 group show, Bermondsey project space, London
2022 June- Body Unbound group show, Stour Galleries, London
2021 November - Komorebi solo show, Open House Hackney, London
2021- Resident at Hackney Wick Underground
2019 -Exhaustion and exuberance, Deptford does Art
2017-Current- Senior Printmaker for Harland Miller at Thumbprint Editions
2018 April- Installation at Vittoria Wharf, London
2016 June-August - Artist Residency at OT301 Amsterdam
2016 August 18 - 4Bid Gallery Solo Show, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2016 August - Installation at De School, alongside Children of the Light - Diapositive. Amsterdam
2016 January 20- Practice What You Teach group show- M2 Gallery Surry Hills
2016 January 19- Visions Beyond group show - Kudos Gallery Paddington
2015 September- Solo exhibition 'SPLIT' Carlton Project space NG gallery, Chippendale