The longer you look at Maki Na Kamura’s paintings, the better they become—but also the more puzzling and even alienating. This is because the works are always somewhere in between: between dream and reality; memory and future; gravity and lightness; exuberance and timidity; but above all between Western painting and that of Asia, distinct painterly traditions that these pieces synthesize with a naturalness and facility that do not disguise the work’s enigmatic quality.

Na Kamura was born in Osaka, as she tells it, in the Year of the Dog. She studied painting in Japan and at the Kunstakademie in