New Paintings and Collages on Display

Takanori Ichikawa is a master of "incense stick painting," a technique where he burns paper with incense sticks. He uses over 60 types of incense sticks, varying them by temperature and thickness, to gradually burn the paper and create his works without any preliminary sketches.

His monochrome gradations and countless perforations, created by tracing his own memories, possess a tension that makes them seem as if they could crumble at a touch, and a world of art woven with bold contrasts.

For Ichikawa, the fading of memory is a source of fear. Preserving memories as something visible is an act that liberates him from that fear.


This marks his first solo exhibition in three years, titled "grace note." "Grace note" is a musical term referring to a note that is played briefly and not essential to the rhythm.

In his 2010 solo exhibition "murmur," he expressed the subtle "rustling" of a forest. The current exhibition, "grace note," further evolves this concept, expressing the sounds within silence, and the subtle transitions between "rustlings."

His new collage works transform forest landscapes, drawn from faint memories, into three-dimensional pieces.

We invite you to experience the unique world of incense stick painting, born from this technique of drawing with incense, on this occasion.

Takanori Ichikawa
An artist. At 13, he used money saved from working as a scaffold builder to travel to New York alone. While traveling through America and Europe, he encountered painting and began creating works through self-study using various artistic techniques. Upon returning to Japan, he began presenting works in a new style, using over 60 types of incense sticks of varying temperatures and thicknesses to create images by lightly scorching paper, based on the fading memories of his extraordinary youth. He has since been acclaimed as the creator of "incense stick painting," which has significantly shifted contemporary painting in a completely different direction, garnering attention both domestically and internationally.

grace note
Dates | Friday, January 13, 2017 - Friday, February 3, 2017
Venue | ES gallery
2-7-4 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo elephant STUDIO 2F