Born in Ehime, Japan in 1984, Ichi Tashiro moved to New York at the age of 18 with only the clothes on his back and a bag full of artwork materials. The self-taught artist began his career by selling his works on the street, sourcing newspapers and scraps of magazines from the trash to create the collage works that are now his signature aesthetic. Over the next five years, Tashiro worked his way into the New York art scene until eventually establishing his presence in Hong Kong, where he actively held shows and participated in fairs across East Asia and Europe for nine years before moving to Tokyo, where he now lives and works.

A scrapbooker since childhood, Tashiro’s obsession with collecting clippings from mangas and magazines came to double as a therapeutic outlet during his youth. The seemingly tedious and time-consuming act of sifting through and compiling materials into new images served as an empowering way for him to craft his own worldview within a strict household, allowing him to “liberate the brain and the imagination” from the stifling confines of the present.

Tashiro’s works, though DIY in their roots, echo the rebellious spirit of the past movements of found object and process art: the transformation of printed media from a functional vehicle of textual information into something subjective, aesthetic, and moldable harkens back to Dadaist ideas of the elevation of non-art into art; a large emphasis is also placed on time and process (gathering, curating, cutting and pasting) as part of the artwork itself. Serendipity and potential are marked themes in Tashiro’s work. Printing errors and accidental ink spills are carefully collected and displayed like rare diamonds, while the low-quality pigment used in newspaper, which lifts easily when scraped with any sort of hard-edged tool, allows the artist to leave behind physical traces of his presence through colorless scratchings and etchings that simultaneously undo the past and create a new reality. Toying with ideas of meaning, context and subjectivity via what many see as a dying medium, the artist arouses nostalgia to question the evolution of media and storytelling in the future. By engaging static, one-sided printed matter into a malleable and ongoing conversation, Tashiro playfully challenges predefined ideas of agency and perspective within an increasingly informatized society, allowing his subconscious to weave together a weightless, surreal world unbounded by rules.