Light crossing border

Ikeda was born and raised in remote Cape Ochi-ishi on the eastern coast of Japan's northern island of Hokkaido. Although subsequently educated at Musashino Art University and now resident in Tokyo, he constantly returns to the bleak images of his childhood environment.

In particular he returns to the memory of the now deserted, derelict building that had once been a radio outpost. The shack was isolated in a barren and inhospitable landscape where plants battled to adapt, fed only by rusty water that seeped from swampy ground veiled in dense fogs from the sea.

For Ikeda the dilapidated radio building epitomises history, recalling the advances in communication together with early aviators such as Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) who is remembered for the first non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic, from New York to Paris in 1927. History has the seeds of our transformation of nature, and it is this dialogue between history and nature during his own lifetime that Ikeda seeks to express poetically.

Jackie Menzies, Contemporary Japanese Prints: The Urban Bonsai, 1992, pg. 33.