Leiko Ikemura (*1951) is one of the best-known artists of Japanese origin working in the West. Her drawings, paintings, and sculptures have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan, and can be found in the permanent collections of many museums in Japan, such as the Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art; the National Museum of Art, Osaka; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art. Leiko Ikemura is the most comprehensive collection of her work, encompassing more than two hundred drawings, the majority of them previously unpublished, and a broad selection of her paintings and sculptures.

Ikemura’s fabulous drawings are celebrated for their oscillations between opposites—light and dark; joy and pain; day and dream. In them, she creates a highly personal, vast, and secretive universe beyond space and time, populated by maiden-like beings and fantastic creatures. Accompanying the lush illustrations are essays by prominent scholars and critics—Roger Fayet, Isabelle Köpfli, Donald Kuspit, Hortensia von Roda, and Eva Scharrer—that foreground Ikemura’s themes and aesthetic approach.

A fascinating volume of work by an artist who bridges East and West, Leiko Ikemura will be of interest to students and aficionados of contemporary art.