Since 1 October, A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE has offered three blousons drawn from the series RAINBOW by Etsu Egami, an artist born in 1994. First instalment of the project TYPE-XVI*, they raise the question that occupies the artist: what is a painting?*
A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE says it creates various forms of “ABLE”, a contraction of “capable”, by going to meet other fields and other industries. For TYPE-XVI Etsu Egami, it partners with an artist born in Chiba in 1994. A graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, she is a visiting professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Kyorin University, where she practises art therapy. In 2025, she received the main prize at the Art Karlsruhe fair in Germany, and her work was acquired by the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe.
Her painting is recognised by its bold strokes, its vivid colours and powerful brushstrokes that recall calligraphy. The three blousons take up three portraits from her series RAINBOW: RAINBOW-Pablo Picasso, RAINBOW-Pierre-Auguste Renoir and RAINBOW-Paul Cézanne. Egami explains that she chose these three artists because they shaped modern painting. She leaves the eyes and nose undefined: the face is born from light and shadow, from lines and brushstrokes of Eastern inspiration.
The brushstrokes are translated through the jacquard weaving techniques specific to A-POC ABLE. In a jacquard, the image is formed by the weaving itself and not laid on the surface of the fabric. The painter’s gesture thus becomes a pattern of threads.
Egami defines what makes a work a painting by three criteria: its materiality, its presence and its relation to our perception. Jacquard weaving acts on all three. The material is no longer paint but thread. The presence is that of a worn garment. The perception changes with the movement of the wearer. The criterion of judgement is therefore whether what the artist calls the dynamism of her stroke survives this translation.
The interest of the project is established: a prizewinning artist, three portraits of painters, a weaving technique put to the test of a fundamental question. The quality of the blousons will be judged on the pieces themselves, by the fidelity of the weaving to the stroke, the cut and the way they hang on the body, and no recommendation can precede that judgement. The outcome of the reasoning is simple: Egami’s question becomes a test of translation. Does a brushstroke hold in a thread? The answer is read on the fabric.
TYPE-XVI Etsu Egami, first instalment: three blousons after RAINBOW-Pablo Picasso, RAINBOW-Pierre-Auguste Renoir and RAINBOW-Paul Cézanne. On sale in the boutique from 1 October. ISSEY MIYAKE Paris, 28 rue François Ier, 75008 Paris. eu.isseymiyake.com.
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