Ana Aragão at Expo 2025 Osaka

From April 26 to 28, 2025, Ana Aragão will take part in Expo 2025 Osaka, exhibiting her series My Plan For Japan at the Portugal Pavilion. This body of work celebrates architecture, urban memory, and the visual identity of Portugal.

Expo 2025 Osaka is one of the world’s largest international exhibitions, gathering countries across the globe around the theme “Designing Future Society for Our Lives.”

Ana Aragão’s participation offers a poetic and detailed perspective on cities and architectural imagination — a vision that merges technical drawing with fantasy, and blends past and future.

Ana will present her emblematic series My Plan for Japan at the Portugal Pavilion as part of Expo 2025 in Osaka. This marks her second exhibition in Japan, following the 2023 presentation of the same body of work at the Hillside Forum in Tokyo.

My Plan for Japan invites viewers on an imaginary journey through reinterpreted Japanese cities — fantastical visions rendered in detailed, hand-drawn works. Inspired by Japan’s culture of precision, ritual, and the beauty of imperfection, these drawings explore what she calls “paper architecture”: graphic constructions of impossible cities and speculative urban landscapes.

The drawings reference Japanese animation, architectural history, and most notably, the Metabolist movement. Highlights of the series include surreal reimaginings of Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, a strangely futuristic Shizuoka Press and Broadcasting Center, the vibrantly colorful Yamanashi Prefecture building by Kenzo Tange, and the iconic Tōkōen Hotel by Kiyonori Kikutake — each architectural icon reborn through the lens of imagination.

At the heart of the presentation is Ana’s iconic piece, O Auto da Barca do Efémero, a folding screen inspired by the historic Nanban byōbu, commemorating 480 years since the arrival of the Portuguese in Japan. This symbolic gesture celebrates the long-standing friendship between the two nations — honoring a shared past while envisioning a common future.

With My Plan for Japan, Ana offers not only a tribute to Japanese architecture and culture, but also a poetic dialogue between imagination and memory, between Portugal and Japan.