Contemporary Art
A NOTE ON THIS PROJECT
Jun Araki does not exist.
He is a fictional artist created and creatively directed by ISHLVLSTUDIOS Generative Lab for SPACE. His likeness, his studio, his voice in interview and the artwork attributed to him were produced through generative image and film systems, directed toward a single, coherent practice.
Every image in this feature was generated, then selected, rejected, sequenced and edited by a human editorial process — the same judgment SPACE applies to any artist it chooses to feature. Nothing here is autonomous. All of it is directed.
SPACE presents the practice with the same seriousness it would give any working artist. Jun may be fictional. The creative decisions, authorship and work presented here are not.
BETWEEN THE LINES
Jun Araki's work exists somewhere between the street and the gallery.
Based in Tokyo, Araki builds large-scale mixed-media compositions from fragments of manga, graffiti, spray paint, hand-drawn marks and layers of abstraction. Faces disappear beneath paint. Panels are interrupted. Lines move across one another without asking permission.
The work carries the visual density of Tokyo without attempting to reproduce the city literally.
For Araki, the collision is the point. What begins with recognizable imagery is repeatedly covered, cut apart and reconstructed until the original reference becomes something else entirely.
BEFORE THE CANVAS
Araki's visual language developed outside of a traditional gallery context.
Growing up around Tokyo, he became interested in the marks people left behind — stickers layered over signs, tags on concrete, advertisements pasted over older advertisements, handwritten characters, manga imagery and the constant accumulation of visual information across the city.
Graffiti introduced a different relationship with image-making: immediate, physical and unconcerned with permanence.
Manga provided another language entirely.
Rather than treating the two as separate influences, Araki began pulling them into the same space. A printed eye might remain recognizable. A face might survive only as a fragment. Everything else is vulnerable to being painted over.
“I'm not trying to preserve the image. I want to see what survives it.”
THE PROCESS
There is no pristine beginning.
Inside Araki's studio, references, prints, paint, spray cans and unfinished surfaces accumulate around the work.
He begins with fragments — sometimes figurative, sometimes graphic — and builds until the composition becomes too resolved. Then he interrupts it.
Paint covers illustration. Black lines break through carefully constructed sections. Spray paint creates gestures that cannot be completely controlled. New imagery is introduced over old imagery.
The process continues through addition and removal. Araki does not work toward cleanliness. He works toward tension.
SELECTED WORKS
Residual 
Afterimage 
Fragments I 
Untitled (Red)
JUN ARAKI IN CONVERSATION
Your work contains recognizable manga imagery, but you frequently obscure it. Why?
Recognition gives me somewhere to start. If you recognize an eye or part of a face, you already have a relationship with the image. Then I can disrupt that relationship. I'm more interested in what happens after you recognize it.
Is graffiti part of the subject or simply part of your technique?
Neither, really. It changed how I make decisions. You learn not to be precious. A mark can destroy something you spent hours making, but sometimes that becomes the reason the piece works.
Do you know when a work is finished?
Usually when another mark would only explain what is already there.
And if you go too far?
Then I keep going.
FROM STREET TO WHITE WALL
Context changes the work.
Placed inside a gallery, Araki's compositions become quieter without becoming less aggressive. Marks that might disappear within the visual noise of Tokyo become isolated against concrete and white walls.
The shift is deliberate. Araki is not interested in reproducing graffiti inside a gallery or positioning the street as an aesthetic prop. The gallery simply provides another condition in which the work can exist.
The marks remain the same. The way we encounter them changes.
SELECTED WORKS / II
Study in Blue 
Signal 
No. 17 
Untitled (Figure) 
False Memory 
Interference 
Fragments II
BEYOND THE FRAME
Araki's practice is beginning to move beyond conventional exhibition space.
Fashion, objects, print and collaborative projects offer another surface for the work — provided the artwork remains more than decoration.
Rather than placing an existing image onto a product, Araki approaches collaboration as an extension of the same process used in the studio: fragmentation, reconstruction and intervention.
Clothing becomes another surface. Packaging becomes another composition. A campaign becomes another opportunity to build an image. The objective is not simply visibility. It is translation.
Araki is still building.
There is the studio practice. There are walls. There are exhibitions. There are objects and collaborations still being considered.
But the center remains unchanged: making the image, disrupting it and determining what deserves to remain.
Tokyo provides an endless amount of visual information. Araki continues to subtract from it.
“I don't need the whole image. Sometimes one piece is enough.”
Selected Works, 2026