Shiori Ichikawa

The inner life of another is unknowable. No matter how close we are, there is no way to fully know what another being feels.

I make work from that place of not-knowing. My gaze toward insects, small animals, and creatures at society's margins is not a search for answers. Knowing that complete understanding is impossible, I reach toward them anyway — it is that act of reaching that gives my practice its meaning.

Biology holds a concept called Umwelt: every creature inhabits its own distinct perceptual world, different from another's. I move between these worlds, from a place that belongs fully to none of them — an in-between position bound up with my own upbringing, a solitary childhood spent closer to nature than to people.

Not-knowing can easily become resignation. My practice moves the opposite way: precisely because I cannot know, I look more carefully.

Seeing does not change what is seen. Yet the fact of having tried to see remains. My paintings are traces of that attempt.

Born in Saitama, Japan, in 1993. I graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts with a BFA in Oil Painting, and completed my MFA in Printmaking at the same university's Graduate School of Fine Arts in 2018.

Both of my parents were veterinarians in a sparsely populated rural town, and I grew up surrounded by animals and nature from an early age. Over time, my interest shifted from the animals themselves to the humans who attempt to communicate with them. I was later struck by the concept of Umwelt, proposed by Jakob von Uexküll in A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, and came to see something essentially human in the act of trying to empathize with another creature's distinct way of perceiving the world.

Could grasping another's world objectively and with care offer a way to ease the misunderstandings and friction that arise between humans across differences in culture, religion, and values? And might such acts of reaching toward another's world point to a form of love that transcends language, common to all of humanity? Working from these questions, I continue to explore, through painting, ways of sharing them.