Zoia Skoropadenko

I

Origins

Zoia Skoropadenko was born in 1978 in Kryvyi Rih, then in the Ukrainian SSR. From the age of five she was tutored by the Ukrainian painter Hryhorii (Grigory) Synytsia. She attended the National Art School in Kryvyi Rih and later studied journalism at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv.

In her teens she was an environmental journalist. At the university she edited the student newspaper Kameniar and studied languages on the side.

She took her degree in international journalism in 1999 and was then turned out of the university. Wikipedia records unfounded suspicions of espionage — a story she has not sought to dramatise.

II

Monaco

In her early twenties she travelled across Europe and settled in Monaco, where she worked for a time as a translator. There she entered the Côte d’Azur art milieu and later became a member of ADAGP. In 2011 the Government of Monaco recognised her as an Artist-Painter of Monaco.

She founded La Vitrine (La Vitrine Contemporaine de Monaco), a small gallery in the Palais de La Scala, used for her own work and for other artists. Her TORSO series — sculptures and paintings formed from octopus bodies — brought wider notice after exhibitions in London, Paris, Brussels and elsewhere.

III

Japan

Skoropadenko has exhibited repeatedly in Japan since at least the mid-2000s, including Monaco–Japan meetings in Monaco and shows in Tokyo, Osaka and Fukushima. In 2015–16 her sculpture The Hope was installed in Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, on a river stone supplied by local people.

She has shown at the Embassy of Ukraine in Tokyo more than once. In March 2018 Ambassador Ihor Kharchenko opened a joint exhibition with Fukushima artist Tatsuro Suzuki on landscapes connected to Chernobyl and Fukushima. Earlier embassy exhibitions included Four Seasons and 5×30.

IV

The Hope

Through Japan, Chernobyl came back into her work. After Soma, the National Chernobyl Museum in Kyiv asked for a Hope of its own. The stone is red granite from Zhytomyr region, heavily contaminated in 1986, some 2.4 metres high. The bronze bird, cast in Paris, is modelled on the narcissus flycatcher, the prefectural bird of Fukushima. It was unveiled at the museum entrance on 26 April 2019, the thirty-third anniversary of the accident, and entered the museum’s collection.

On the night of 23–24 May 2026 Russian missiles struck Podil. The museum, reopened a month earlier after restoration, lost its roof and some forty per cent of its exhibits. The Hope was not damaged.

V

Sumo

For years she has drawn and painted inside sumo stables and during tournaments — work made from direct observation rather than from photographs alone. The subjects are ritual as much as contest: the ring, the referee, the rope of the yokozuna, the quiet before the charge.

A recurring focus is Taihō Kōki (Ivan Boryshko, 1940–2013), the 48th yokozuna, whose father was of Ukrainian origin. In 2020 the Embassy of Ukraine in Japan patronised her virtual exhibition Life of a Sumo Champion for Taihō’s 80th birth anniversary. In 2025–26 the Taihō Sumo Memorial Museum in Teshikaga, Hokkaido, presented Life of the Champion for his 85th anniversary, again with embassy support.

VI

Among champions

The museum displays place her work beside trophies, photographs and portraits of Taihō. The dialogue is not decorative: Ukrainian origin, Japanese rank, and a painter who keeps returning to the same ring.

VII

Tokyo, 2026

From 12 to 18 October 2026 she presents SUMO: The sacred spirit at Annex Aoyama / Pasona Square, Tokyo — contemporary works from the stables, shown with historical objects tied to sumo’s traditions.