Leiko Ikemura

Ikemura first began her career in Switzerland primarily with drawing. Though she has continued to work in other mediums since, critics have stressed that her drawings have always been complete and individual works in themselves rather than preliminary sketches for later paintings or sculptures.[11]

Ikemura herself has expressed a particular emotional affinity with the medium of drawing, describing it a "immediate and honest," with this honesty being a crucial tenet to her work and lifestyle. She has also noted the vast stylistic potential of the medium and how this is manifested in her drawings throughout the course of the career. "There must be a hundred different possibilities of treating drawings," she said in 2019 interview, "and sometimes people think there are a hundred different people in me, because my drawings from each period are so distinctive."[12]

In the early 1980s, Ikemura noticed a shift in her work. Working in Germany amongst other "wild painters," she found that her strokes had become aggressive, and the themes increasingly violent. Seeking to gain some space to regroup and start afresh, she went on a retreat to the Swiss Alps, where she began to do some work with landscape painting.[13]

Starting in the 1990s, she began to experiment with both small paintings, to focus more closely on specific subject matter, as well as larger-scale triptychs. Ikemura's triptychs consist largely of landscape elements, fusing imagery from European landscapes Japanese landscape imagery. They incorporate both natural scenery and animal subjects. Art critics and historians have surmised that her choice of the triptych is in part an act of cultural translation, another subtle incorporation of transnational religious/spiritual elements that imbues the work with the sense of abstraction and multiplicitous interpretative potential that Ikemura's artistic universe is so known for. The triptych is a format used by European painters throughout history, often to depict religious scenes or narratives. Ikemura's triptychs, in contrast, do not evoke this subject matter, and there is often no clear visual linkage between the separate panels in terms of subject; however, the use of the format still creates this subliminal association. In her work Genesis, Ikemura makes this association even clearer; while the landscape depicted is of the Tōkaidō, an Edo period road that spanned from present-day Tokyo to Kyoto, the title of the work links the historical Japanese trade route with the biblical story, creating a compelling, though abstract visual narrative.[14]

The motif of the young girl first became prevalent in Ikemura's work in the early '90s, and has since been a recurring subject in her oeuvre. Ikemura explained one of her reasons for the choice of this motif in a 2011 interview:

“When women are represented in art, they are women as seen by men. That’s why I feel it is a crucial task for me to depict females, at the ambiguous and uneasy age when women are formed, as subjects rather than objects.”[15]

Feeling herself that she was taught to grow up and leave childhood behind quickly due to this societal model of girl/womanhood, Ikemura seeks to push back against stereotypical depictions of girls in popular culture (in both Japan and beyond) as meek, helpless, decorative, and sexualized. Such subversions of these models can be seen across her work, including her terracotta "Cabbage Heads" from 2015 onward, her oil paintings of a subject called "Miko" in the 90s, and her recent tempera portraits.[16]

In addition to images of girlhood, tensions and conflict between mothers and their children also appear frequently in Ikemura's work.[17]

In recent decades, the motif of the rabbit has featured prominently in Ikemura's work, in both her drawings, paintings, and sculpture. In line with other prevailing elements of her craft, the rabbit has been chosen in part as a subject because of the many experiences and interpretations it affords: the rabbit features prominently in Japanese folk literature as synonymic with the moon. It is also a prevalent theme in European art history, featured in the works of artists like Joseph Beuys and Albrecht Dürer. Adding to this ontological complexity, it has also appeared as a symbol of fertility in folklore around the world and is a major figure in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, a book featuring a similar kind of abstract, dreamlike universe to that created by Ikemura's works.[18]

Ikemura was deeply affected by the aftermath of the March 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, and in response created the first largescale Usagi Kannon. This sculpture, standing over 3 meters in height, depicted a hybrid of a rabbit and the Mother Kannon (the Japanese Bodhisattva of Compassion). The lower half of the figure was hollow, so that viewers could enter the work itself and feel a sense of protection and healing.

Variations of the Usagi Kannon have since appeared in a number of public spaces and institutions, including in Valencia, a train station in Recklinghausen, the Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum in Shizuoka, Kunstmuseum Basel, and the foyer of the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne.[19] The variations in Ikemura's sculptural works result both from conscious artistic choices, such as variations in materials used and placement of features of the figures, but also as capitalizations upon incidental imperfections in the artistic process. Comparing her to a musician, Kosme de Baranano writes: Ikemura sees no imperfections in the casts or in the cast iron that has not yet fully cooled: If she notices a flaw, a metal burr or an air bubble, she immediately sees the opportunity to re-orchestrate, to add another chord, to complete her jam session.”[20]