Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka Found a Blueprint for Survival in Ancestral Ways of Making
Early in his psychoanalytic inquiry, Freud pointed to the possibility that “the whole of humanity has become neurotic under the pressure of cultural urges.” A substantial body of literature addressed this concern, before and since, warning as early as the first Industrial Revolution of the dangers of the utopian drive to relentlessly technologize our lives. And this growing tension between anthropogenic and natural environments has continued to produce disturbances in human behavior and the psyche.
Japanese Canadian artist Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka has long explored the interplays of instability, adaptation and attunement between humans and their environments. This year, her work features prominently in the main section of the Venice Biennale, taking over the Giardini entrance corridor leading to the main pavilion, and can also be found in the inaugural Maebashi Biennale and a major installation on Toronto’s new Lassonde Art Trail.
Hatanaka’s practice could hardly feel more timely. By recovering ancestral technologies and ecological wisdom, she addresses our lost environmental attunement, with pieces that serve as both repositories of embodied collective knowledge and records of the interconnected changes affecting humans and their surroundings.
“This attunement to the nature around us helps with our survival, but we’re becoming less and less attuned,” Hatanaka told Observer during the Maebashi Biennale installation. “Animals have this knowing and sensing, and if humans can be aware of animals’ behavior, then that’s the type of knowledge we’ve developed over a really long period of time.” She links many contemporary social disturbances to the conceptual separation of humans from nature: once the natural world is perceived as external to human life, it becomes far easier to exploit and damage.
Her reflection resonates with much of the literature examining how life grew increasingly artificial over the course of the 19th Century. Lewis Mumford, a leading critic of mechanization and industrialism, described this phenomenon as a shift toward “monotechnics,” brought about by the loss of a “technological pool once deeply grounded on the earth and resulting from interacting with soils, climates, plants, animals, human populations, institutions and cultures… When they were eliminated from the system of production, that vast cultural resource was wiped out.”
Hatanaka’s approach seeks to recover ancestral ways of thinking about the relationship between making and natural resources, turning her practice into a means of reattuning to nature’s cycles of creation, transformation and regeneration. Her works are made from washi, paper produced through an ancient Japanese tradition she studied in depth after returning to Japan to trace her heritage. A key moment came during a 2022-23 residency at Kashiki Seishi, a seventh-generation, family-run washi mill in Ino, Kōchi Prefecture, near the Niyodo River. There, she learned the process firsthand—from harvesting kōzo (paper mulberry) and preparing the bark to forming sheets—and worked closely with the mill’s papermakers, including master washi maker Tatsuyuki Kitaoka and Washi+ founder Ayumi Hamada.
The technique is rooted not only in generational tradition but in an intimate knowledge of the land and its ecology. “I’m using traditional crafts tied to the earth,” Hatanaka explained. “These are all ways in which humans have drawn from the localized environment to make something very useful but also quite beautiful.” This is technē in its original sense: an embodied phenomenology of making, a propensity to craft that springs directly from observation and activates the vital, irreplaceable cognitive and imaginative link between hand and mind.
Hatanaka sees contemporary discussions of technology overlooking ancient and traditional methods, despite their sophistication and the accumulated knowledge of materials, ecosystems and survival they hold. “Let’s actually look at what we already know within our bodies, in terms of knowledge, rather than trying to keep coming up with the next thing,” she said, proposing an alternative to modern technologies that have grown increasingly disembodied, desensitized and depersonalized.
The solutions to our problems, for Hatanaka, are within reach, embedded in knowledge passed down across generations. Her practice points toward an alternative—yet primordial—notion of technology as art, one that reawakens the human in the act of making rather than commodifying and alienating it. “Maybe it was something that felt almost dormant because I was growing up in an urban environment that was completely tied to capitalism,” she reflected when asked what drove her to revive these ancient techniques rather than turn to new media.
Traditional papermaking still depends on a community and on collective knowledge that exceeds any individualistic mode of production. The process compelled Hatanaka to reattune not only to the power and necessity of the collective but also to nature’s cycles of matter and energy, repositioning human creation within a broader ecological order in which it can participate rather than merely destroy.
Viewers are often surprised to learn her sculptures are made of paper, a material they are used to regarding as cheap, disposable and industrial. Therein lies the crucial difference between mass-produced paper and traditional washi, and much of the alchemy behind the latter’s strength and resilience. “In the papermaking process itself, you’re recombining natural fibers through
From traditional papermakers, Hatanaka learned to see the finished sheet as the manifestation of a healthy, localized ecosystem. The quality of the paper depends on clean
For the installations at the Maebashi Biennale, Hatanaka drew on local traditions, combining handmade washi from Kiryu with her own paper and washi from Kashiki Seishi. She also incorporated koinobori (carp-shaped streamers) printed by Hiraken in Kiryu, a city renowned for its textiles.
Hatanaka began deepening this understanding of environmental attunement years ago, during her time in the Arctic, particularly in Kinngait, Nunavut, off the coast of Baffin Island. What began as a residency grew into long-term, community-engaged work with local youth. With Patrick Thompson, she co-founded the Embassy of Imagination, which works with young artists in Kinngait on printmaking, murals, sewing and public art projects, placing strong emphasis on intergenerational transmission. “I definitely grew an appreciation and a better understanding of that through spending time in an Inuit community in the Arctic because this was so far from my experience,” Hatanaka said. “I grew up in Toronto. I was just in a city, and this was so far from my understanding or conception of nature and the world, like it is for so many of us.”
The distance modern societies have placed between humans and nature has produced a profound sense of disturbance—one often masked by the supposed comforts of contemporary life yet ever present, like a wound that widens as our ability to connect with something larger erodes. One of her works in Venice, Moveable and Immoveable, stages this notion of landscape as embodied knowledge. Rock-like sculptural forms made from sewn washi carry linocut imagery derived from snowdrifts in Kinngait, formations the Inuit have long read as navigational guides. Her other major work in Venice, Namazu, draws on the Japanese myth of a giant catfish whose movements beneath the earth cause earthquakes. Fish recur throughout her practice, but this particular creature led her to consider earthquakes as metaphors for abrupt life events that demand adaptation.
A core concept guiding Hatanaka’s inquiry is bipolarity, understood not simply as a disease or fixed pathology but as a form of adaptive oscillation. Her interest stems from an evolutionary hypothesis proposing that, amid the extreme climatic variability of the Pleistocene, radically different energetic states may have offered survival advantages: withdrawal and energy conservation under hostile conditions, followed by heightened energy, a reduced need for sleep and rapid associative thinking when conditions improved. “It’s a fascinating thing to consider. It brings it back to humans’ natural capacity to actually respond to the environment,” she said. “This attunement to nature for survival seems like a crazy thing that somehow we lost along the way. We’re losing it so rapidly, even though it’s the most basic form of how we survive, adapting to all these very localized climates over generations.”
What interests Hatanaka even more is the reversal this hypothesis permits: bipolarity becomes not merely an individual dysfunction but a possible form of embodied environmental responsiveness, suggesting a different rhythm through which humans might navigate their surroundings and move toward a more symbiotic relationship with them.
For Hatanaka, the environmental argument is therefore inseparable from mental health, which is always shaped by an awareness of one’s place in the world and by a relentless effort to adapt, to find balance between the self, the body and the world beyond it. Her works often pair psychological states with ecological imagery to suggest their interdependence. Faultlines and Loneliness, a black-and-white work shown in Venice, charts the rising use of the word “loneliness” since the 19th Century, while related works trace the growing prevalence of language tied to pathology and mental health systems.
Through these inquiries, Hatanaka has come to see neurodivergence as potentially carrying forms of intuitive knowledge relevant to collective survival—a condition that can expose the consequences of the wider fracture between humans and their environment. “People mostly relate to mental health conditions as a problem, or somehow a failure or ailment of the individual. Obviously, a large part of it is really deeply challenging to experience. But I think there is also inherent wisdom and aptitudes within it,” she argued. This is precisely why she finds the evolutionary theory so compelling: rather than framing such divergence solely as malfunction, it becomes a kind of superpower, one marked by heightened sensitivity and an ability to register forms of collective instability that society itself may fail to recognize.
The idea takes on particular urgency amid today’s climate instability. The causes of the current environmental crisis differ greatly from those earlier humans faced, but the need to adapt remains. “As we’re in such an extreme climate crisis again, I think it’s more apt to think about the ways in which this might hold wisdom,” she said. Rather than chasing technological novelty, Hatanaka seeks to recover knowledge that lives within bodies, collective memory, inherited crafts and myths—all of which originated through sustained observation.
Her wearable paper sculptures grew out of a similar discovery. She was fascinated to learn that paper had historically been made into functional, breathable, insulating clothing and that paper garments were once far more common than most people realize. The surprise these objects provoke opens a conversation about forgotten technologies and endangered craft traditions. She hopes greater awareness might spark collective concern for their survival and prompt reflection on the costs of our relentless pursuit of progress.
Her approach to art-making embraces a different tempo, deliberately resisting the constant acceleration and demand for productivity imposed by capitalism and by an art market that has absorbed the same logic of hyperproduction and saturation. “I want to be aware of not falling prey to the pressure to be hyper-productive,” she said, “because it’s kind of the antithesis of what I’m doing.”
Much of her work embodies the more sustainable, artisanal slowness of physical making, proceeding through observation and responsiveness to material. In her sewn works, materials and fragments of time find new life: Hatanaka saves scraps of paper rather than discarding them, allowing remnants of earlier works to migrate into later ones. Each piece is materially bound to those that came before, part of a continuous circulation of matter and energy that yields to cycles of transformation rather than forcing a predetermined outcome.
The slow time of handcraft inherent in koinobori, the traditional processes Hatanaka employs and the washi makers who preserve centuries-old techniques, along with the landscapes that sustain them, can all be understood as forms of resistance: to the acceleration, individualism and environmental destruction that underpin capitalism, and to the forces eroding our psyches, our health, our communities and the environment as a whole, once we recognize how deeply everything is interconnected.
“In terms of our environment and the crisis we find ourselves within, slowness is an affront, or a resistance, to this constantly oppressive acceleration and requirement to be productive under capitalism,” she said. In this, she echoes W. Brian Arthur’s argument in his 2009 book The Nature of Technology, which offers a fitting coda to the reflections Hatanaka’s art invites at this moment in our civilization. “Technology is part of the deeper order of things. But our unconscious makes a distinction between technology as enslaving our nature versus technology as extending our nature,” Arthur wrote. “This is the correct distinction. We should not accept technology that deadens us; nor should we always equate what is possible with what is desirable. We are human beings and need more than economic comfort. We need challenge, we need meaning, we need purpose, we need alignment with nature.”
Crafts will not remain unchanged forever, but their capacity to survive through change is part of imagining and co-creating another reality, Hatanaka reflected as our conversation drew to a close. “This includes traditions that connect us to our bodies, to nature and to one another,” she added.
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