Blindspot Gallery is pleased to present “Please Remember Me”, Shu Ikeda’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. The artist expresses the short‐lived beauty of nature through his artwork.

The artwork of Shu Ikeda has been introduced to the Hong Kong audience from his first appearance in a past joint exhibition with Cozue Takagi, “Fragmented Emotions”. Formerly trained as a painter, Ikeda used to engage photography merely as a tool to assist himself in painting. He eventually grew increasingly fond of photography and found it a medium that enables him to capture the fleeting moment in life. Ikeda later developed a unique method he regards as “painting with photography” by combining photography and paper cutting.

The central subjects in Ikeda’s work are nature and light. Cutting patterns on photographs of natural landscape he took, Ikeda expresses the fragility of nature’s beauty and its changes over time – that it will inevitably fade away due to its mortality. The cutting of the image also represents Ikeda’s cropping of a moment in reality; while the pasting and reconstruction of the image represent the reinvention of reality in a new shape. The ordinary scenery then becomes an extraordinary one that does not exist in the real world, it is a new world of art that can be found in neither painting nor photography.

Ikeda also mounts cutout photographs on transparent acrylic to allow light to penetrate through the cutout patterns. Shadow casted on the wall and the punctuated photos contain a variety of visual effects that invite comparisons between illusion and substance.

Each piece of Shu Ikeda’s work is a unique creation. They are delicately hand‐made by the artist, each pattern is cut out carefully by a paper cutter. The creation of each piece of his work can easily take a few months to finish.

As one of the most promising young artists in Japan, Shu Ikeda won the Mayor of Judge Prize among 1,000 candidates at Tokyo Wonder Wall 2009, and he was further selected to participate in the 2010 TWS‐Emerging program (a program sponsored by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government to promote local young artists). He recently had a solo exhibition, “trivial today, transient tomorrow”, at Tokyo Wonder Site as part of the TWS‐Emerging program.

Shu Ikeda will be present at the opening reception. Interviews with the artist are welcomed and can be arranged in advance.

About Shu Ikeda
Born in Hiroshima, Shu Ikeda (b. 1979) studied painting in Tokyo Zokei University and graduated in 2004. Since his debut solo exhibition “fragmentary time” in 2007 in Japan, Ikeda has risen as one of Japan’s up­‐and­‐coming artists with his Honorable Mention at Canon’s New Cosmos of Photography in 2009 and accompanying exhibition at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. He also won the Mayor of Judge Prize at Tokyo Wonder Wall 2009. He now works and lives in Tokyo, Japan.

Opening Reception: Friday, 11 March 2011, 6:30 to 8:30pm