青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

“Twenty years’ worth of works rendered with a submillimeter pen point, one ten-centimeter-square patch a day”: that was how The Pen, Manabu Ikeda’s collection of a hundred self-selected works, was billed when it was published in 2017 in conjunction with a nationwide touring exhibition of the same name. One work in particular—the monumental three-by-four-meter Rebirth, inspired by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami—moved exhibition-goers so greatly through its portrayal of the journey from despair to rebirth that it quickly led to the publication of another book, The Birth of Rebirth, featuring fifty-two close-up details of Rebirth along with the artist’s own commentary.

This updated edition of The Pen weaves in the entire contents of The Birth of Rebirth, which has since gone out of print. It also includes a new essay by Ikeda and thirty-nine added works, some all new, capturing the worldview nurtured in him through the making of Rebirth, ruminating on the people and things around him during the Covid-19 pandemic, and addressing the city of Vancouver, where he once resided. Here is the definitive collection of the art of Manabu Ikeda, presented in the same spectacularly large format as before.

Manabu Ikeda, born in 1973 in Taku, Saga Prefecture, completed undergraduate and graduate studies at the Tokyo University of the Arts in 1998 and 2000, respectively. From 2011 he spent a year in Vancouver on a grant for emerging artists from the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs. In June 2013 he began Rebirth, a three-by-four-meter work inspired by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, as an artist-in-residence at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin; an exhibition featuring the work toured Japan to great acclaim in 2017.