Nanako Kono Japanese, b. 1999

Biography
Image of the artist Nanako Kono
Image of the artist Nanako Kono

Born in Tokyo, Japan, Lives in Chicagoland, IL

 

Education

MFA, The School of The Art Institute of  Chicago

BFA  in Art, concentrating on painting, drawing, printmaking and minor in Art History University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV.

 

Nanako Kono’s work examines the boundary between language and interpretation. She is drawn to moments when articulation exceeds intention, when expression slips from human control and new meanings begin to surface.
 
Informed by the structural logic of comics, Kono incorporates speech balloons, panels, and recurring visual signs into her paintings, merging drawing, print, and collage. The layered transparency of acrylic serves as both a formal and conceptual device, reflecting the mutable relationship between communication and perception.
 
Her sensitivity to the vitality of objects arises from a Japanese sense of animism, where materials are understood to possess their own quiet agency. This awareness unsettles the distinction between the animate and the inanimate. 
 
Kono’s experience learning English as a second language deepened her engagement with linguistic instability: the way meaning shifts and multiplies as it moves across languages, signs, and systems of representation. In her work, words behave as sentient forms - a latent will emerging through the instruments of making.
 
Nanako Kono Resume LSK 2025 (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
Exhibitions
Works