Emi is best known for her abstract painting in bold colors featuring the motif of four classical elements (fire, air, water, and earth).
[6] Emi's daughter, Anna Ogino, is an Akutagawa Prize-winning novelist and emeritus professor of French literature at Keio University, Tokyo, who serves as the custodian of her mother's works and legacy.
[4]: 62 In her early career, Emi actively exhibited her works at the annual juried salon hosted by the Kōdō Bijutsu Association (行動美術協会; literally "Action Art Society").
In Paris, Emi frequented the Louvre Museum and she "was astonished by the evidently long tradition of concrete expression in European painting, especially in regard to the nude.
Nevertheless, the development of [Emi’s] abstract painting does not readily indicate her debt to such movements but, rather, speaks to the personal efforts made by a painter who continued to change course in pursuit of a unique mode of expression.
In 1958, Ichirō Haryū, one of the most influential "Big Three" critics of postwar Japan,[13] visited Emi's solo show and described her Symbol (象徴) as follows: "Expressive elements are restrained, and an architectural structure consisting of colored rectangular planes and lines is outstanding.
"[4]: 59 [14] Despite such applause by the influential male critic, Emi "subsequently reversed the two canvases that comprise Symbol and incorporated space between them when they were shown in the Second Shell Art Award Exhibition of 1958.
[16] Although her work was shown alongside four male artists—Minoru Kawabata, Kumi Sugai, Tadashi Sugimata, and Ryōkichi Mukai—her presence was far ahead of its time.
According to Masao Momiya, "the period from 1967 to 1974, during which she made conceptual works and realistic, or illusionistic works—sometimes in the form of shaped canvases—was a difficult time of trial and error.
[4]: 60 After the trial and error period, Emi returned to abstraction with brighter colors, and from 1975 to 1986, she "purposely incorporated natural actions in her production by employing the 'dissolving' technique to the overall canvas, and she succeeded in expressing her own view of the cosmos.
I am aiming at having a cosmic space appear as an integrating factor among these elements, and I will do so.”[4]: 60 Moreover, in 1981 Emi unveiled a series of geometric abstract paintings, bearing titles borrowed from the Rubáiyát, the collected poems of Omar Khayyam, the eleventh and twelfth centuries Persian poet.
Masao Momiya pointed out: "Since 1987, the 'dissolving' technique that [Emi] had originally applied to the overall canvas has been gradually curtailed to become only one of a number of productive means of the painter.
In other words, while unexpected elements of nature, such as the mixture and the dissolution of substances and the forces of gravity have been restrained, the painter's own hand creates overall painting again.