Welcome to our new feature, Artist of the Week, in which we celebrate faith-driven artists making work for universal audiences.
Singapore-based, award-winning multidisciplinary artist Namiko Chan Takahashi is one of Singapore’s most accomplished portrait artists; her work is found in many private international collections as well as in public institutions such as the Istana and the National Gallery of Singapore.
Namiko specialises in seeing the Imago Dei in every person, and portraying their dignity and beauty in her oil paintings. For example, in 2015 she launched the 10,000 Profiles Project, rendering 35-minute profile portraits of friends and perfect strangers, in order to explore the assumptions we make about people when we first see them; eventually God worked through the project to serve the Orang Asli – the indigenous people of Peninsular Malaysia.
Along with her husband – prize-winning poet, community organiser and ethics lawyer Aaron Lee – Namiko runs the Laniakea Culture Collective, and is regularly invited to conduct painting and art exploration classes for the public. As if this wasn’t enough – she now directs, teaches and dances with Singapore’s first branch of a Hawaiian Hula dance school. In short, Namiko is an astoundingly talented, hard-working and empathetic artist doing fantastic things in Singapore.
We were privileged to feature Namiko in our first ever Sputnik Poetry & Visuals anthology, alongside her husband – pick up a copy by joining Sputnik Patrons!