Rei Sato

Born in 1984, Rei Sato is one of the youngest stars of Kaikai Kiki, artist Takashi Murakami's Tokyo-based art production company, which states the goal, "By organizing world-class exhibitions and projects, handling public relations and artist's biographies, and offering Murakami's personal feedback on work in progress, Kaikai Kiki is dedicated to the growth of these emerging artists." Since exhibiting in the inaugural GEISAI, Murakami's annual art fair, Sato has become known for her disarmingly naïve drawings on photographs. The photographs featured in this volume, however, are unmodified. Carefully composed poetic snapshots, the photographs of the Sun series were created during Sato's routine walk between home and the Kaikai Kiki studios. The book, Sato's first, is comprised of hundreds of these images, which draw on Japanese pop culture, manga, Impressionism and abstraction alike to create a playful, intuitive, earnest and highly expressive body of work.
Rei Sato graduated in 2005 from Tokyo's Ochanomizu College of Fine Arts and Design. Since then she has participated in solo and group exhibitions at such international venues as the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris and Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York.