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 in 1969, where he studied oil painting, and took up copperplate etching — largely self-taught — 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 a photographically derived light-sensitive resist on copper plate to produce intaglio images combining the precision of photography with the tactile qualities of etched line and aquatint tone, with each print beginning from a photograph he has taken himself. As he committed to printmaking he turned decisively away from painting.

His principal studio is in Ochiishi, a fishing settlement on the Nemuro Peninsula on Hokkaidō's east coast, established in a converted former radio-transmitting station — a base that lets him work directly from the maritime, fog-bound, weather-driven landscape that has dominated his subject matter for much of his career. He also maintains a second working studio in Tokyo, 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, and over a long teaching career has been an influential figure for several generations of younger Japanese intaglio printmakers. In 2019 the Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo held a two-person exhibition pairing him with the artist Ebizuka Kōichi, a significant late-career institutional presentation of his work.

Ikeda's work is held in major public collections including the British Museum (London), the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Hokkaidō Museum of Modern Art, 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 at the University of Alberta in November 1994 and has since donated more than 200 works on paper to the University of Alberta Museums, making it among the largest single repositories of his print work outside Japan.

Ikeda's practice has extended across several media — photography chief among them, since his prints originate in photographs of his own — 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 Art Gallery of New South Wales collection, is one of the most-cited examples of his mature photo-etching practice, while earlier figural etchings from the early 1980s represent a transitional phase before he fully committed to the photo-etching process he is associated with today. He has described his approach as informed by Zen — "a vacuum around which each of these mediums revolves," in his words, "a vacuum which unites the arts with the zen spirit."