Alisa Tanaka-King

Alisa Tanaka-King is a Japanese-Australian artist based in Warrandyte, Victoria, whose practice combines printmaking, sumi-ink and watercolour painting, calligraphy, bookmaking, public installation, performance, and food-as-art. She trained in printmaking and drawing at the University of Melbourne's Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), receiving a Bachelor of Fine Art in Printmaking in 2009 and a Postgraduate Diploma of Performance Creation (Animateuring) at VCA in 2012. She has subsequently studied calligraphy with master Kazuki Yamane in Kyoto and undertaken a residency at Awagami Paper Factory on Shikoku.

Her most widely seen project, The Bird Girls (2016–17), is a memorial work begun in response to the rate of women killed by violence in Australia. Tanaka-King drew a faceless ink portrait for every woman killed by an act of violence in Australia in 2016 — seventy-four sheets in total — and exhibited the full series at Hamer Hall, Melbourne, where it launched the Victorian Government's 16 Days of Activism initiative in 2017. The series mobilises her training in sumi-ink and ink-on-paper drawing to a public-political register, and remains the project for which she is best known.

Alongside The Bird Girls, her socially-engaged practice includes F.O.C.U.S, an ongoing international conceptual dining project that combines installation, storytelling, and locally-sourced seasonal food in a single durational artwork; My Generation and Art Across the Ages, intergenerational public-art initiatives challenging ageism through collaborative murals; and Dumplings Darling: Love Without Borders, a performative cross-cultural cooking-and-storytelling project. The community art strand of her practice is anchored in her role as Arts and Wellbeing Coordinator at Ballarat Community Health, a position she has held since 2013.

Her studio printmaking output — primarily lithography, relief printing, sumi-ink drawing, and bookbinding — is exhibited in solo and group shows in Melbourne and circulated through her own Warrandyte studio, Hawthorn Studio & Gallery, the Make It Collective, and her web shop. The print and illustration shop carries a parallel commercial line of greeting cards and small editioned illustrations alongside her exhibition-only artwork. Her textile-illustration work for the Australian baby-products brand Milkweed represents the design side of her practice.

Tanaka-King is a recipient of the Creative Victoria Sustaining Creative Workers Grant (2020), a 2016 International Emerging Artists Award winner, and an Australia Council ArtStart Grant recipient (2015–16). Her residencies include AARK (Finland, 2016), Arteles (Finland, 2014), and La Wayaka Current's Arctic and Desert programmes (2017). She maintains a regular workshop and teaching practice across Victoria and has worked extensively in arts-and-mental-health, designing and delivering creative psycho-social services.

Within Hanga's contemporary scope she sits at the boundary between studio printmaking and socially engaged practice. Her commercial print catalogue is small and primarily illustrative, but her trained printmaking background, Japanese calligraphic training, and community-art portfolio give her a distinctive cross-cultural voice in Melbourne's diasporic Japanese-Australian printmaking community. The Bird Girls remains the work most cited in the public record as a single-artist printmaking-adjacent project of national reach.