Ryoji Ikeda

Ryoji Ikeda (born 1947, Nemuro, Hokkaidō) is the Japanese printmaker credited with introducing the photo-etching process to Japanese print practice and one of the principal figures of postwar Japanese intaglio. He is distinct from the widely better-known international sound and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda (born 1966), who is also Japanese but works in data-driven sound and light installation; the two artists share a romanized name but are unrelated. The painter-printmaker Ikeda Ryoji (池田 良二) was born to a samurai-class family in Nemuro, a small fishing town on the far northeastern coast of Hokkaidō, and the cold, weather-shaped Hokkaidō coast remains both his subject and his physical base.

Ikeda graduated from Musashino Art University in Tokyo, then served as a lecturer at the Tokyo Polytechnic of Photography before formally adopting etching as his principal medium in 1975. He is regarded by Japanese print historians as the founder of the photo-etching printmaking process in Japan — a technique that uses photographically derived light-sensitive resist on copper plate to produce intaglio images that combine the precision of photography with the tactile qualities of etched line and aquatint tone. Once committed to the photo-etching process he stopped painting entirely.

His principal studio is in Ochiishi, a fishing town on a peninsula on Hokkaidō's east coast — a location that allows him to work directly from the maritime, fog-bound, weather-driven landscape that has dominated his subject matter since the late 1970s. He maintains a second working studio in Tokyo with a custom-designed printing press, and his work consistently moves between Hokkaidō field reference and the Tokyo printing process.

Ikeda has held the position of Professor of Printmaking at his alma mater Musashino Art University, where his teaching role makes him directly responsible for several generations of younger Japanese intaglio printmakers including Saki Murakami (Musashino, MFA 2016) and others in the post-2000 Musashino print cohort. The Two Artists' Works Series exhibition at the Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo (April–July 2019), pairing him with the artist Ebizuka Koichi, was the major late-career institutional retrospective of his work.

Ikeda's work is held in major international collections including the British Museum (London), the Hokkaidō Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Setagaya Art Museum (Tokyo), the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), and the University of Alberta Museums in Edmonton, Canada. The Edmonton connection is unusually substantial: he first arrived in Edmonton in November 1994 — what he has called "the very beginning of a personal and creative trajectory" — and has subsequently donated more than 200 works on paper to the University of Alberta Museums collection. The donation, with its scale, makes the U of A one of the largest single repositories of Ikeda's print work outside Japan.

Ikeda's practice extends beyond print into sculpture, ceramics, photography, and installation, but the photo-etching print remains his central medium and the basis of his international reputation. His 1991 work Light Crossing Border, held in the AGNSW collection, is one of the most-cited examples of his mature photo-etching practice. Earlier work — including the 1983 figural etchings — represents a transitional phase in which he was still working in conventional figural intaglio before fully committing to the photo-etching process he is associated with today. He has said his approach to print is informed by Zen philosophy: "a vacuum around which each of these mediums revolves."