Biography

Ajungla Imchen is a contemporary artist whose work bridges painting, textile design, and craft traditions. Trained at Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University – the renowned art institution founded by Rabindranath Tagore in Santiniketan, West Bengal – she completed a rigorous Fine Arts diploma course covering painting, sculpture, textiles, and ceramics, with a specialization in textile design.

Ajungla’s body of work integrates formal artistic training with years of experience in design and handicraft practices within local communities. She worked for several years in the textile industry and founded KOYA, a textile unit that collaborated with local women weavers in the state of Nagaland to promote indigenous craft and reinvention of cultural traditions.

In 2025, Ajungla pivoted her artistic medium back to the canvas. She is now dedicated full-time to her studio practice, focusing exclusively on painting. She finds painting to be a very versatile medium that allows her to freely express herself on a deeply personal level.  “I find painting to be cathartic. Very often one does not have a fixed notion of how a painting should look like. You start with a mark and it begins to tell you a story. Painting allows you to tell other people your story,” she says. Ajungla works across oils and acrylics, with an emphasis on the latter. She also experiments with mediums like water, a process she describes as delicate and fragile.

While some of Ajungla’s past works used mixed media and graphic printmaking to explore fantastical and anthropomorphic imagery, her current focus is on abstract art. Her process is highly intuitive and fluid; a single brush stroke or a small speck of paint can give a different meaning to the effect she desires to achieve, or the narrative she wants to convey. This foray into abstract art has been a journey of discovery, where unknown and unexpected forms come to life.

Ajungla’s latest series of paintings draws inspiration from the cosmos, and explores creating layered canvasses through a meticulous technique of building thin layers of paint to achieve a sense of luminosity, transparency and depth. Ajungla says that creating this series has a spiritual and interactive experience between her innermost emotions, physical senses and the external world – strokes of paint, water and form flow freely without conscious restraint. She is keen to continue experimenting with abstract forms and different mediums as the possibilities of what can be created on the canvas remain limitless.

Ajungla’s textile artwork and contemporary paintings have been showcased internationally and domestically, including in exhibitions at Maison du Gouverneur (Paris), Saffronart, the India International Centre (New Delhi), and various private collections. Her textile designs have also been exhibited at lifestyle spaces like Baro Market in Mumbai and Z's Precinct in Kolkata.

Ajungla lives and works in Nagaland, India.