Shiori Ichikawa

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.