tiki

tiki was playing football in Germany when the league was cancelled because of COVID-19, and returned to Japan for a time. While back home, deeply moved by artworks seen on social media, tiki drew a line under eighteen years of football and set out on the path of an artist.

From the very beginning, tiki has consistently painted “children holding empty treasure boxes”. The empty treasure box is a symbol of having nothing, yet it is also a metaphor for freedom, holding infinite possibility. The children have no real-life models; all of them are born of tiki’s imagination, and what to put in the treasure box is left to the children themselves. At the root of the work lie a release from the sense of confinement felt in early childhood, and the question of what “freedom” is. tiki works every day in the belief that a day will come when children all over the world take hold of the freedom of being “empty” and fill it richly with colour.

The work is not confined to two-dimensional pieces; it extends to 3DCG video and to a series of sculptures made from 3D models. In recent years tiki has also collaborated repeatedly with companies: a collaboration car painted directly onto the body of a Mercedes-Benz “CLE”, and limited-time menu items such as a collaboration latte at the café attached to Mercedes-Benz Urayasu, attracted attention.

tiki also puts great effort into supporting children, an aim that overlaps with the concept of the work. In April 2022 tiki travelled alone to slums in Thailand, going from house to house to deliver food to children. For solo exhibitions at BARNEYS NEW YORK Yokohama, Hyatt Regency Kyoto and The Kahala Hotel & Resort Yokohama, among others, tiki gave art materials to children at local children’s homes. At Hyatt House Kanazawa, tiki held an art event for about twenty children from children’s homes in the city, and the children’s works were displayed in the hotel; the event was also reported in the Hokuriku Chunichi Shimbun. Through art, tiki aims to improve the circumstances children live in and to widen the choices open to each of them.