ABOUT
CONTACT
email - araki.koman@gmail.com
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Araki Koman (b. 1987, Paris, FR) is a French visual artist based in Antwerp. Her work explores slowing down as a gateway to deeper connection, with ourselves, our surroundings, and the quiet, sacred layers of the world. For Araki, this slowing is less about pace than about perception: a softening of the gaze that allows unseen textures, emotions, and relationships to surface.
Working primarily with drawing, collage, and textile, and extending into photography and artist publications, she embraces processes that honour simplicity, intuition, and material sensitivity. Her practice is informed by Japanese aesthetics (ukiyo-e, mingei), Indigenous ways of knowing, mysticism, ecofeminist thought, and the ethos of Arte Povera. These lineages shape her attention to presence, interdependence, and the subtle movements of the world.
Her work invites a gentle shift in awareness, creating openings for rest, attentiveness, and deeper intimacy with the everyday. This perceptual softening becomes a quiet political gesture, a way of reclaiming time, presence, and the capacity to feel beyond the pace and noise of contemporary life. Through a poetic visual language of nuance and stillness, she offers spaces where viewers can pause and reconnect with the subtle intelligence that moves through all living things.
Born to Guinean and Malian parents and having lived across Europe, Asia, and North America, Araki Koman has developed a fluid, borderless way of seeing shaped by movement, multiplicity, and a sensitivity to the invisible threads connecting place, memory, and emotion. She is the author and illustrator of Find Your Wild Feminine, published by Chronicle Books.
Photograph by Saly D. (2025)
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2019 BLOOM - BrauLab (Rathenow, Germany)
2018 BLOOM - Sapporo Tenjinyama Art Studio (Sapporo, Japan)
2018 Global Couture - Benk + Bo (London, UK)
2015 Soulful - Les Expos à la Maison, Edition #17 (Paris, France)
ARTIST RESIDENCIES
2019 Palazzo Pitti (Rathenow, Germany)
2018 Sapporo Tenjinyama Art Studio (Sapporo, Japan)
SELECTED WORKSHOPS
2025 Intuitive Collage workshop
- Intā (
Antwerp, Belgium)
2018 The Londoners Community Live Drawing
- London Festival of Architecture
(London, UK)
2018 Global Couture workshop
- ELCAF (
London, UK)
SELECTED EDUCATION + KEY EXPERIENCES
2025 Certified 220h Kundalini Global Yoga Teacher
2024 - 2025 Co-founder of Intā (Antwerp, BE)
2024 - 2025 Kundalini Global Yoga Teacher Training
2022 Hand-built pottery course at FICA (Lisbon, Portugal)
2021 Contemporary collage and mixed media: intensive course
with Simon English (London, UK)
2021 Ink: Colour and Mark course - Morley College, (London, UK)
2021 Sound healing course - Sound Mysterium (London, UK)
2020 Hand-built pottery course (Hastings, UK)
2019 - 2021 Usui Reiki level I, II, and Master training
2018 - 2022 Founding and directing PRECIOUSIMPLICITY
2014 Fashion Design, VIA TEKO (Herning, Denmark)
2013 Textile Design internship, JÖR (Reykjavik, Iceland)
2012 - 2016 Founding and directing OUM x YUKI
2011-2012 Graphic Design, Shillington College (London, UK)
SELECTED COMMISSIONS
Penguin Random House
Ten Speed Press
Water Doulas
New York Times Magazine
Chronicle Books
Icebreaker
Shillington College
The Atlantic
Refinery29
SELECTED TALKS/PANELS
Adobe Live France (2020)
Ladies Wine Design London (2018)
Global Generation (2018)
SELECTED INTERVIEWS
She and her matcha
Musubi Magazine
Photographs by Saly D. (2025), James Elliott (2021, commissioned by Musubi Magazine), Nicolas Bal (2020)
Araki Koman’s practice is an inquiry into how we reconnect with the subtle, instinctual layers of life. Working across drawing, collage, textile, ceramics, photography, and artist publications, she approaches each medium as a form of attentive listening. Some works emerge through immediacy and spontaneous line; others through gestures of layering, stitching, assembling, or shaping clay. What unifies these processes is her commitment to material intimacy, intuitive rhythm, and sensitivity to nuance.
She is drawn to modest materials, paper, thread, cloth, clay, reused fragments for the histories they carry and the presence they evoke. Engaging with them becomes a way of tracing the quiet correspondences between internal landscapes and the wider world.
Her work often creates a perceptual slowing, inviting viewers into a softer, more attentive relationship with their surroundings and with themselves. This gentle shift in awareness becomes a subtle form of resistance, a reclaiming of time, presence, and perception from inherited rhythms of speed and separation.
Her influences draw from Arte Povera, Japanese aesthetics, Indigenous ways of knowing, mysticism, and ecofeminist thought, lineages that honour presence, interdependence, and the sacred woven through everyday life. Through restfulness, perception, and embodied attention, Araki Koman’s works open portals to deeper connection and quiet forms of liberation, inviting a return to the subtle intelligence that moves through all living things.