Tomoaki Ichikawa [ Bun・Sui・Rei ]

Dates｜  2025 / 4 / 19 sat. – 5 / 17 sat.

Venue｜  √K Contemporary

√K Contemporary will hold Tomoaki Ichikawa’s solo exhibition Bun・Sui・Rei from April 19th (Sat) to May 17th (Sat), 2025.

This exhibition will feature works from the Kanagawa Prefectural Hall Gallery’s last exhibition “Sleep, Good Children, Where Good Children Sleep”, held at the end of last year, in addition to new paintings and wood sculptures.

Tomoaki Ichikawa created his signature “Monster Series” in response to the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. These strange yet somehow nostalgic “characters”, depicted as human bodies sporting monster heads, live the same everyday lives as us humans within the paintings. What are these “monsters”, depicted using classical Western painting techniques, trying to tell us?

In our daily lives, we don’t often contemplate upon the concept and existence of “humans”. We go to school or work, talk with friends and colleagues, eat, go to sleep, and wake up the next morning – an everyday routine. However, there are times when that banal routine is suddenly disrupted, causing us to doubt and think. These are the moments in which we are forced to face and actually acknowledge events such as natural disasters, wars and conflicts, that otherwise occur constantly outside of our bubble.

When Ichikawa witnessed the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, he felt as if he had been thrown into the world of special effects superhero movies (known as the genre of tokusatsu). The world that he had immersed himself in as a child on the TV screen, depicting confrontations between heroes and monsters and the human drama surrounding them, returned to his mind. However, in the real world, there are no heroes, a fact further confirmed as he witnessed the realistic instincts of people running around in confusion in the wake of a disaster. As he faced the blank canvas, Ichikawa questioned if humans were actually the monsters wearing masks. Ichikawa expressed these thoughts by drawing “monsters”, sometimes as self-portraits and other times as portraits. In Ichikawa’s works, these monsters are not the kind of villainous beings that attack humans commonly found in tokusatsu movies, but rather live mundane, ordinary lives. They are cute and familiar, yet strange, reminiscent of Japan’s highly cultivated “character” culture, but they also evoke the sadness and loneliness of those living in modern society, reflecting the human condition.

Disasters and conflicts occur ceaselessly around the world, and Japan is currently under threat of a massive earthquake lying in wait in the Nankai Trough. In these circumstances, it seems to us that we need to face past disasters, as well as man-made disasters such as war and nuclear accidents, and learn from them in order to hone and properly use our human instinct and reasoning.

We hope that Ichikawa’s works will provide an opportunity for all to reconsider what humanity should be, and how we can act in the future.

■ Artist Statement

How many things are there that we take for granted, that we all share as natural assumptions?

I think that such assumptions are just vague, naive beliefs. But when serious incidents occur, I am sometimes shocked to see how different our convictions actually are.

In our daily lives, we act without thinking. We routinely go about our daily work and life.

When a problem arises that is too great to deal with in everyday life, it feels as though you are catching a glimpse of the true faces of the people around you for the first time. This is probably because when people step away from the roles they are playing and are forced to speak honestly, their true thoughts and personalities emerge.

The world is complex and intricate, and it makes me realize that I am merely gazing at the veiled surface of my everyday life.

The title of this exhibition, “Bun Sui Rei“, or “watershed”, has many meanings.
(Watershed refers to a mountain range that divides rainwater into different river systems, or by extension, to the division of things.)

Meaning, the exhibition itself is a turning point for me as its creator, and I am riding the flow of its current, wondering where it might take me next.

It also has a slightly negative connotation, in that each person has their own watershed, the ridge of their thoughts, and even one subject can flow into many different places, so people will never understand it in the same way and they will never be able to truly understand each other.

This huge platform we call society brings us all together, with all our different hobbies and perspectives, and shapes our daily lives. I marvel at how it can integrate and govern all these diverse people.
But in recent years, that foundation has been greatly shaken, and it seems that a more fundamental review is required, as we cannot simply keep patching up the cracks.

Perhaps we are at the watershed moment of our times. That is what I feel.

Tomoaki Ichikawa