Ikkyū Rei

Biography

Ikkyū Rei’s practise celebrates Japanese culture, emanating the fusion of tradition and hyper-modernism. It is with an iconographic base with which he seizes an opportunity to make a link, with a humour that characterises his works, between Japanese tradition and the contemporary globalised world that he never ceases to observe.

Rei began drawing from a young age as he grew up inspired by the illuminated signs of Tokyo’s Shinigawa district where he lived. His foregrounding interest in the shotengai, where neon lights intermingle along expansive pedestrian shopping streets, have led him to explore the nuances of such environments.

The shotengai, a Mecca of economic and social life with its inimitable atmosphere, has also been conducive to the observation of the thousands of people who wander there every day, another of Rei’s passions, which is reflected in his current production of portraits.

 While growing up in a family gladly open to European culture, his father also encouraged Rei’s passion for the traditional martial art of Sumo wrestling. Returning every year from London to his native Japan, he and his father continue to attend tournaments at the Kokugikan Sumo Hall in Tokyo. We can draw similarities between traditional Japanese woodblock print works of sumotori and Rei’s colourful, graphic and electrified figures.

In these works we see too the inspiration of irezumi, a traditional form of tattoo whose representations of fauna or flora, religious motifs, heroes or folk figures, provide Rei with the starting point for his own works.