TOMOAKI ICHIKAWA

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.