Fuku Akino was born into a family of Shinto priests at a shrine along the Tenryu River. She was taught to paint in the style of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) and Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) by a drawing teacher at an ordinary elementary school, and received instruction in painting from an art teacher at a women’s teacher training college. Although she briefly became a teacher at an elementary school in her home neighbourhood, she found herself unable to give up her ambition to become a painter, and in 1927 she became a student of Rinkyō Ishii (1884–1930), a Japanese nihonga painter active at Kan-ten, the government-sponsored salon-style exhibition, and in 1929 of Suishō Nishiyama (1879–1958), also a nihonga painter. The following year, Akino exhibited her works at the exhibition of a private art school, Seikō-sha, in May and at the government exhibition in October. The work exhibited at the former portrays three young male apprentices enjoying a short break on their day off, dozing from the fatigue of their usual daily routine as they are gently shaken by the movement of the train or being a little nervous about this rare outing. The work presented at the latter exhibition depicts a poor woman walking barefoot with, the hem of her kimono drawn up, in an undeveloped area on the outskirts of Kyoto, where cooking utensils have been discarded amongst the overgrown weeds. In the following year, Akino’s work depicting an emaciated stray dog wandering in the wilderness under the blazing sun was passed over for Kan-ten. Both of these motifs were unusual for nihonga painting, but Akino had always been interested in people living in the lowest strata of society and in wide, desolate expanses of land, and her distinctive choices of theme were already apparent at this point.

In 1932, she married Kōjin Sawa (1905–1982), a senior student at the private art school, and their first son was born in January the following year. Due to her family’s financial situation, Akino chose typical motifs for her paintings that were to be exhibited at Kan-ten, where the decision over whether or not a painting would be selected was often directly related to its price. She continued to show paintings with familiar motifs at the Seikō-sha exhibition in the spring and the government exhibition in the autumn without fail. Examples of these works are On the Sand (1936, collection of the Kyoto City Museum of Art), which depicts the artist and her three children resting by the Tenryu River in her home town, with shadows that were rarely seen in nihonga paintings at the time, and Red Clothes (1938, collection of the Kyoto City Museum of Art), a work in which Akino used variations of red paint to depict five young female models in five different poses around a square table, which won a special prize at the government exhibition and established her reputation as a young female painter.

In 1948, seeking a venue for her artistic activities in the new world following Japan’s defeat in World War II, Akino established the Sōzō Bijutsu association of artists (renamed Sōga-kai in 1974 after the Nihonga Painting Division of the Shinseisaku Kyōkai) with like-minded mid-career Japanese painters from all across Japan. The works that she presented here were based on her own children, an ideal subject as she could make them adopt whatever poses she desired, repeatedly sketch them, and pursue deeper study and research at home. Akino’s use of restrained, subtle colours and organic outlines was highly acclaimed, as were her powerful depictions of groups of figures, focusing on how the forms of the as-yet not fully mature bodies were articulated. In 1951, she was awarded the first Uemura Shōen Prize, given to a young female nihonga painter, for Boys in the Nude (1950, collection of the Akino Fuku Museum, Hamamatsu).

At a time when she was depicting coastal landscapes while teaching at Kyoto City University of Arts and seeking new motifs for her paintings, Akino heard that an Indian university was looking for someone to teach nihonga painting, and went to Visva-Bharati University as a visiting professor for a year from July 1962. While teaching nihonga painting, she also toured the whole country and found herself enchanted by its majestic nature. She went on to make a total of twelve visits to India and devoted the latter half of her life to the India series, initially painting magnificent landscapes such as Sunset over the Plain (1964, collection of the Kyoto City Museum of Art). However, impressed by the people, who laboured hard day after day with an unshakeable faith even in harsh environments, she gradually moved onto depicting the landscape on a more domestic scale, with auspicious decorative rangoli patterns heartfeltly created by poor, illiterate women, as seen in Prayer of the Earth (1983, collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto), and paintings of temples, such as Terracotta Temple (1984, collection of the Akino Fuku Museum, Hamamatsu). In 1999, she was awarded the Order of Culture, but her vigorous enthusiasm for painting continued unabated. In 2000, she travelled to Africa on a study trip at the age of 92, and immediately presented the results at the Spring Sōga Exhibition the following year. Akino continued to work until the very end, passing away in October of the same year.