How Painter Akira Ikezoe Became the Spring’s Breakout Star in New York

Akira Ikezoe has been thinking a lot lately about what milk can do. Yes, it can be obtained from cattle, packaged, sold and consumed. But what if you could paint with it, or bathe in it, or even be resurrected by drinking it?

These scenes all appear in a new painting by Ikezoe, which depicts a series of nude figures (and a few skeletons) restrained by ropes in a dairy-centric system that happens to involve a fire pit and a large mural. In typical Ikezoe style, everything is soberly described diagrammatically in the instructions. It’s funny, weird, and a little scary.

Standing in front of the painting in his New York studio, Chi Tian points to the top of the canvas, where faceless figures tug at the udders of two cows. “They took the milk from the cows and started using the milk as paint,” Ikezo said of the scene. “But someone kicked the paint can and stepped on it, leaving footprints. And then someone fell in the hole and died. There were four boxes on the right, almost like the seasons changed – spring, summer, etc. In the winter, a skeleton came out. The skeleton helped them churn the milk, and the milk went into these little bags and flowed down.”

After Chi Tian told the whole story with a serious face, he finally smiled. “Yeah, I know it doesn’t make sense,” he said, laughing.

His work’s refusal to follow rational ways of thinking is intentional. “I take a lot of different things from the real world and create something new, re-building the world inside me,” he added. “I entertain myself with no meaning or purpose.”

Ikezo’s attempt to reshape the universe according to his own absurdist logic has won him many admirers this spring, thanks to his simultaneous appearance in two prestigious exhibitions in New York: the Whitney Biennial and MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, a periodic survey of New York artists. He is one of only two artists represented in both exhibitions, the other being Taína H. Cruz.

Appearing in both shows would be a career moment for any artist, but Ikezeng’s case is particularly noteworthy because he was previously not that well-known in New York, although his exhibitions have been steady in the city since moving from Tokyo in 2010. He doesn’t even have a New York gallery. Instead, he’s represented by Proyectos Ultravioleta, a beloved commercial space in Guatemala City known for turning artists with small but loyal followings into superstars on the biennale circuit. Ikezoe seems ready for this trajectory, following his current exhibition at the 2025 Sharjah Biennale alongside artists such as Wael Shawky, Richard Bell and Raven Chacon.

Despite all the curators and critics who have been visiting his small but orderly studio on the fifth floor of a downtown tower over the past few months, Chitian has maintained a quiet presence. Wearing a slate-colored outdoor study jacket and a gray shirt, he expressed a willingness to listen to others’ analysis of his paintings, even if he didn’t always agree with them. “Sometimes people see animals as symbols,” he told me. “They see frogs and automatically think of bad politicians.” He thought for a moment, then added: “Well, yes, but that’s not what I’m doing.”

Compared to many other works in the Whitney Biennial, Chi Tian’s work does have a lighter feel. Robot stories surrounding solar panels (2025), one of his works in the exhibition, depicts a robot harvesting pearls from a giant clam shell and impersonating Botticelli Birth of Venus. It could all be read as a joke if it weren’t for the fact that other robot workers nearby are building solar panels, devices that might one day help solve the energy crisis.

“Incorporating animals into his work allows him to talk about serious issues without being influenced by the doom and gloom of disaster aesthetics,” said Whitney Biennial curator Marcela Guerrero. “Fantasy is a vehicle for entering these heavier topics.”

“There are many, many reactions when looking at his work,” said Greater New York curator Ruba Katrib. “It’s humorous, but there’s definitely a sense of sublime horror when you figure out what’s going on. There’s more going on in these paintings than what you see.”

Ikezo’s own words seemed to prove Guerrero and Catrib right. During our visit to the studio, he spoke extensively about the devastating Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, at one point showing me a manila folder filled with evacuation manuals stolen from airplanes. “Every time I fly, I get one,” he said. Diagrams of passengers pulling out flotation devices and assuming the location of the crash are presented with a clear, legible aesthetic akin to Chi Tian’s paintings. “These are really just visual ways of illustrating a story,” he said.

Born in 1979 in a suburb of Kochi, Japan, he moved to Tokyo at the age of 18 and studied printmaking at Tama Art University. He began creating oil paintings in high school and said he hopes to continue that path in college. “I told the professor I wanted to draw, but the professor said, ‘No, here you have to study printmaking.’ So I did that for four years, and it was kind of boring to me,” he said.

“But there is a bright side,” Chitian added. He noted that oil paint dries very slowly, so he would repeat the same job over and over, rarely knowing when to stop. “Printmaking is very different. You have to decide in advance how to complete an image, and the rest just comes naturally – just this color, this color, this color, and it’s done. After college, something changed with my oil paintings: the colors became thinner, and I would paint one, two, even three layers. The process of printmaking influenced me.” His earliest mature paintings, often filled with snarling creatures arranged in chaotic formations, began to contain monochromatic backgrounds, which became a staple of his art.

Dissatisfied with Japan’s art scene, Ikezo turned his attention to New York and began exhibiting at the now-defunct Esso Gallery. He moved to the city in 2010, two years after his first Esso exhibition, because the city’s artists “had ideas we never thought of in Japan.” Has he ever thought about going back? “Zero,” he said. “I’m married to a Guatemalan woman”—the artist Jessica Carlyle—“and my son goes to school in New York. Our life is here.” (Guerrero, the Whitney Biennial curator, says Ikezo is one of the few male artists she has met who frequently refers to his fatherhood.)

When Ike arrived in New York, he was able to read English, thanks in part to his mother, who taught English to Japanese high school students. “Listening and speaking are completely different,” he said. As he tried to understand this new form of communication, he began drawing grids of different objects, grouped by function rather than aesthetics. “Because I didn’t speak English, I started collecting images by category,” he said. “I think I was developing my own version of classification. I’m still doing that.” A new painting from the series in the PS1 show, for example, features a bomb next to a protruding eyeball, an umlaut “O” next to a ball of yarn, and creepy twins The Shining There is a pair of dogs nearby.

The year after Ikezen moved to New York, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami caused a power grid failure, causing the Fukushima nuclear power plant to release radioactive contaminants into the surrounding area. “I started to really think about our relationship with nature, and that nature and culture are always invading each other, and that’s exactly what happened in Fukushima,” he said. His paintings increasingly focus on the non-human, the transference of energy and crumbling systems. He also produced an animation, Hole (2014), a nude version of him wanders a colorless world filled with hybrid creatures, including a dog-headed fly that at one point carries Ikezo’s dismembered head back to the rest of his body.

“He sees life at its surface,” said Zeynep Öz, curator of the 2025 Sharjah Biennale, which includes Ikezoe. “What he was going through made him feel very hopeless and disillusioned, but he was very light-hearted in the face of all these serious things.”

Oz’s invitation to Chi Tian coincided with a change in his mind. At the time, he was not a fan of nuclear power, but he began to wonder whether it still offered possibilities for the future. “I’m still against nuclear power plants,” he said, “but I understand the need for them at this moment — there are so many wars. But I hope technology will replace them. This may be the beginning of my interest in new technologies.”

He said he is currently working on a painting about aquaponics, in which fish waste powers a system that relies less on water and land than other similar systems. “I was watching this documentary about a Japanese scientist whose dream was to make [aquaponics] That happens in outer space, making food for astronauts,” he said. “But it still takes people to feed the fish, so in order to fully close the loop, humans actually have to be a part of it,” he said. I’m making my own version of the system with people involved. ”

I told Chi Tian that he seemed to be effectively envisioning how to use power more equitably and sustainably. “That doesn’t happen in the real world, does it?” he said. “I enjoy creating my own world.”