Leiko Leiko Ikemura & Noemi Smolik

Mein Weg mit der Kunst

On the Familiar and the Foreign

The Japanese-Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura first garnered international recognition in the early 1980s with pictures in an expressive and pugnacious style that associated her with the Neue Wilde. She is now famous for oil paintings showing girls floating in oddly hard-to-place settings and cosmic landscapes populated by fabulous hybrid creatures. Japanese audiences cherish her as an artist whose headlong immersion in Western art prompted a growing appreciation of her cultural roots, eventually leading her to a singular synthesis of both cultures.

Wrestling with the profoundly unfamiliar, loneliness, and the challenges of making new languages one’s own: these salient themes in Ikemura’s work are also major concerns in the writings of Noemi Smolik, an art critic whose work focuses on a deeper understanding of the history of Eastern European and Russian art.

In this book, Leiko Ikemura and Noemi Smolik discuss historical junctures and interests in which their quite different lives and careers have intersected: existentialism, the revolution of ’68, Russian literature, the foreign and the familiar, collectivism and individuality.