Akira Ikezoe’s Frogs and Bears Have Something Urgent to Tell Us

Akira Ikezoe welcomes me into his studio wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt made by the Cevallos Brothers, with whom he was recently featured in the Greater New York survey at MoMA PS1. That is just one of several large-scale exhibitions and international biennials Ikezoe has participated in over the last few years, including the Sharjah Biennial last year and this year’s Whitney Biennial. As a result, his studio is sparse, save for a few paintings in progress.

Ikezoe offers me tea as we recall meeting in 2023 at the Rehearsal Art Book Fair, co-organized by Bungee Space and Accent Sisters. There, Ikezoe introduced me to his Baby Recipes series (2022), in which babies’ body parts become ingredients in illustrated, comic-style cooking guides. In the studio, I ask where the idea came from.

“Frustrations around raising my three-year-old son,” he responds.

I ask whether his wife was concerned when she first saw the drawings.

“No, she was enjoying them. She understood what I was feeling.”

Akira Ikezoe pouring tea in his studio

We laugh. It is precisely this dark humor that initially fascinated me, and it continues to suffuse Ikezoe’s work, which deals with energy systems, resource extraction, and the ambiguities of natural and industrial cycles alike. Laughter comes easily with Ikezoe, whose frankness about morbid subjects is immediately disarming. The cartoonish earnestness of both artist and artwork belies a sharp attentiveness to the environmental and human-engineered catastrophes unfolding around us. Humor becomes the concealed vessel for his satire.

Akira Ikezoe, "Bears on the Diagram of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant" (2021), oil on canvas (photo courtesy the artist)

Ikezoe’s meticulously detailed oil paintings, the works that catapulted him to prominence, depict anthropomorphic frogs, bears, raccoons, and monkeys engaged in industrial workflows, hallucinatory labor systems, and sequential transformations unfolding across flat, diagrammatic backgrounds viewed from above. For years, his compositions drew directly from found flowcharts and blueprints, materials he notes are typically excluded from the realm of art. That’s particularly true for the work he showed at Sharjah, for which he paired diagrams from nuclear power plants that have experienced serious accidents with animals native to those ecosystems. In these paintings, Chornobyl is operated by bears; Three Mile Island teems with raccoons. He explains that his earlier works depicted mostly naked humans, but because nudity could not be shown in Sharjah, he shifted to animals, and the imagery stuck.

“I love frogs,” Ikezoe said. “My grandparents were farmers, and when I visited their home, the frogs were so noisy at night. Their rice fields were filled with water, a really nice house for frogs.”

Left: Watercolor sketches in Akira Ikezoe's studio; right: paintings leaning on and attached to the wall in Akira Ikezoe's studio

Ikezoe’s knowledge of animals rivals his understanding of energy infrastructures. This becomes especially clear when we begin discussing nuclear power and the unresolved dilemma of its toxic waste, particularly in the wake of catastrophes such as the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, which occurred just months after he moved to New York in late 2010.

“I started thinking about how civilization and nature are always invading each other,” he said. “Our cultural and natural parts are always contradicting each other. Countries are now building more nuclear power plants because oil supplies are unstable due to war.” Ikezoe understands that this is an inevitable trajectory, given our global energy needs: “Just saying no to nuclear power now feels impossible. We need something to substitute or replace it. Let’s hope technological development offers solutions.”

Akira Ikezoe, "Nuclear Power Plant and Star Formation" (2026), oil on canvas (photo courtesy the artist)

At their core, Ikezoe’s works grapple with the cost of prioritizing short-sighted economic growth over local communities and the long-term consequences of nuclear waste. Yet they also propose fantastical, circular alternatives: imaginative new systems of energy and exchange.

He traces these concerns back to his childhood in Kochi, Japan, where his nature-loving parents hunted, collected specimens, and spent weekends in the mountains or by the ocean. As a child, he imagined working closely with nature, perhaps becoming a zoologist, before turning his attention to art as a teenager, eventually enrolling at Tama Art University in Tokyo. But it is partially a result of that early interest in the natural world that Ikezoe draws less from art history than from science magazines, documentaries, and science fiction films.

He walks me through a painting currently in progress.

Akira Ikezoe in front of a painting-in-progress in his studio

“This blue painting is about a geothermal energy plant for a greening project in the Sahara Desert. Heat comes out of a volcano, making steam in the energy plant, ”

Mid-sentence, Ikezoe accidentally brushes the painting’s surface. We laugh as he wipes the gray smear onto the wall beneath it.

“The electricity powers these streetlights, which attract insects. I’m going to paint chameleons eating the insects,” he continued. “Then, from the other side, camels come out of the volcano smoke. Their humps open and people put the chameleons inside. Then the camels go into the desert and die. From the dead bodies, plants grow out, greening the desert.”

Akira Ikezoe, "Not So Still Life with a Visual System" (2024), oil on canvas (photo courtesy the artist)

We burst into laughter again. The novelty of Ikezoe’s work lies partly in the absurd internal logic of his image-making: the magical mutability of physical properties, or the free association of completely unlike things. Of course, the spiral tail of a monkey can be planted and grow into a tornado. It’s so simple, even a child could figure that one out.

“The studio is my playground,” he said. “People who come here are adults, so I have to explain what I’m making in the sandbox. My work is purely self-entertainment, and it’s difficult to explain why it’s important.”

I chuckle again, incredulous, as it’s difficult to imagine how Ikezoe’s concepts could possibly be unimportant. For all their whimsy, his paintings are deeply concerned with humanity’s future.

Two paintings-in-progress by Akira Ikezoe in his studio

Our conversation drifts to aquaponics and solar power.

“Solar panels are very problematic in Japan right now,” he explains, “because companies are cutting down forests to install them. It’s so contradictory. They don’t understand the real purpose of solar panels. I wanted to make fun of that in this red painting.” Ikezoe gestures towards a painting-in-progress with several painted flat zones on a maroon background, soon to be populated by whimsical beings on massage chairs as part of a larger circulatory system.

Hanging next to it is a piece from Ikezoe’s Chart of Darkness series (2025), featured in Greater New York. The series demonstrates his associative thinking through pairings of animals and objects that blur distinctions between nature and culture, scientific and spiritual, clean and hazardous, human and nonhuman.

“I’m making up stories between things with similar visual characteristics, like bananas and crescent moons,” he explains. “When I first came to New York, I couldn’t speak English well, so it was difficult to explain what I was doing as an artist. I started organizing things into categories based on shape. Then I realized this already exists in Japanese folklore, people worshipping a giant rock shaped like a genital organ as a fertility symbol, for example. There’s no scientific connection, but people create stories based on visual similarity. I thought, ‘Oh, this is how folklore begins.’ I wanted to make a contemporary version of that.”

Akira Ikezoe, "Chart of Darkness, 1,2,3,4 and many" (2025), oil on canvas (photo courtesy the artist)

Indeed, Ikezoe’s contemporary myths function like diagrams or dictionaries for understanding the world without relying on written or verbal language. Untethered from specific linguistic or cultural markers, they become universal. Their imaginative logic recalls the childhood impulse to find shapes in clouds.

I ask whether he talks with his son about the paintings.

“He understands them immediately,” Ikezoe said. He goes on to tell me that the two exchange ideas often, and his son’s concepts sometimes make their way into the work.

Beyond their humor and visual pleasure, Ikezoe’s paintings crucially illuminate the afterlives of materials we prefer not to think about, especially those that resist neat systems of reuse or disposal. They bring man-made and ecological networks into dialogue, where the resulting exchange is equally likely to be a hard truth or a visual joke. Death and decomposition, reincarnation and recycling, appear with neutrality, inevitable components of continual transformation. There are no protagonists in these worlds, no hierarchy. The system itself is the story.

Left: Akira Ikezoe's laptop, featuring a diagram; right: preparatory drawings of objects for his paintings

Speaking with Ikezoe, I realize how adulthood often narrows our ability to think associatively. As we age, we tend to interpret the world more literally, losing access to the connective logic Ikezoe has so carefully cultivated. Exercised fully, this mode of thinking might help us imagine speculative futures and unconventional solutions to the crises of the present, many of which Ikezoe’s work quietly points toward. It might also reveal how deeply implicated we already are within these systems.

Or it might lead us to a world in which moles eat Chinese food as part of a closed power grid. Thanks to Ikezoe, at least, we can picture it: The scene currently hangs in vivid color on the sweeping walls of the 2026 Whitney Biennial.