When the Japan Foundation named Ei Arakawa-Nash as Japan’s representative for the 2026 Venice Biennale, it was not just a curatorial decision—it was a seismic readjustment of how nations can perform themselves on the world’s grandest artistic stage. A queer artist, a new parent, and a former Japanese national, Arakawa-Nash inhabits contradictions like a dancer slipping between steps—gracefully, defiantly.
He intends to use the platform to challenge nationalism and patriarchy, drawing from his experience of queer parenthood and the tender 1962 film Being Two Isn’t Easy, scripted by Natto Wada. It’s a fitting touchstone: a story about vulnerability and the clumsy magic of new life, now expanded into a metaphor for nations, families, and identities in flux.
From Fukushima to Venice via Los Angeles: Ei Arakawa-Nash way
Born in Fukushima in 1977, Arakawa-Nash spent two decades in New York’s feverish downtown art scene before relocating to Los Angeles. Now a professor at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, he brings a uniquely international lens to the often inward-facing rituals of national representation.
His “exhibitions and performances are often created through fervent collaborations with artists (and at times their artworks), art historians, and with audience members themselves. His activities undertake the lo-fi mimicry, duplication, and embodiment of cultural forms—be they architectural structures, art historical legacies, or organizational systems—to reanimate their potentialities anew. Since the early 2000s, Arakawa has been at the forefront of renewing the visibility and advancement of performance art internationally, and has mined both its vintage forms (such as Japanese Gutai, New York’s Fluxus, Happenings, and Judson Dance Theater, and Viennese Actionism) as well as numerous contemporary manifestations of movement, entertainment, and togetherness. His work, initially appearing spontaneous or improvised, is underpinned by a deep commitment to collaboration as well as addressing the specific contexts of the people for which it is created.” He is a core faculty at the Graduate Art program at ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA, USA. portrait: Ricardo Nagaoka
His work—an unruly, gleeful offspring of Gutai, Tokyo Fluxus, Happenings, Judson Dance Theater, and Viennese Actionism—refuses to sit still. It destabilizes the “I,” dismantles the invisible wall between performer and audience, and insists on collaboration as the heart of creation. His installations feel less like monuments and more like breathing organisms: vulnerable, demanding, ecstatic.
Arakawa-Nash’s Mega Please Draw Freely (Tate Modern, 2021) transformed the austere Turbine Hall into a chaotic garden of public participation. This July, it will bloom again at Haus der Kunst in Munich, woven into the exhibition For Children. Art Stories Since 1968.
If his past works are any clue, his Venice project won’t be a pristine object behind velvet ropes. It will be a living, sweating, possibly weeping environment—an act of becoming, not being.
Redrawing the Pavilion in Venice Biennale: New Powers, New Possibilities
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the Japan Pavilion’s selection model has shifted. Artists must now fundraise and select their own curators, wresting control away from institutions and thrusting it into the artist’s own ink-stained hands.
For Arakawa-Nash, this administrative upheaval is not a burden—it’s a canvas. “This means the artist has more agency to turn their ideas into a show,” he says. Agency, for him, has always been about undoing the expected and imagining otherwise. It recalls Dumb Type’s queer interventions and Yuko Mohri’s delicate rewritings of material histories—fellow artists who made the Japan Pavilion less about patriotic display and more about radical dreaming.
At a moment when cultural identity is increasingly weaponized, Arakawa-Nash proposes a soft rebellion. His vision is not to hoist a flag but to cradle it, to question why we carry flags at all, and to wonder what other gestures might be possible between strangers.
Why This Moment Matters
Arakawa-Nash’s appointment is a quietly revolutionary act. In a Venice Biennale often weighed down by nationalistic self-promotion, his presence promises to crack open fresh air. Here is an artist who embraces the messy edges of identity—the awkward hybridity of being queer, diasporic, a parent, a former citizen—all while refusing the easy theater of victimhood or triumphalism.
He isn’t content to speak for Japan. He speaks to it, with it, against it—sometimes all at once.
In a time when the art world often confuses polish for power, Arakawa-Nash reminds us that vulnerability, collaboration, and failure are not weaknesses. They are new ways of imagining the future. They are the art.