The Japanese painter, cartoonist and photographer Daisuke Ichiba grew up in Kumamoto, the main city on the southern island of Kyushu. Self-taught in art, in the 1980s he became an important player in the Japanese Otaku counterculture. Strongly influenced by the golden age of manga and the avant-garde, he started painting at the end of the 1980s and self-published his first book, A 37-Year-Old Bastard, in 1990. Since then he has produced nearly twenty volumes of artwork, mostly in France by radical publishers including Le Dernier Cri, Lezard Noir, and United Dead Artists.

In 1997, he created Misen Ezumi, a character who recalls past events triggered by a female clerk he met while shopping at a convenience store, who appeared in several of  Ichiba’s comic books. In 2006 he held his first solo exhibition at Le Monte en l’Air gallery in Paris; the following year he held another solo exhibition there, and in 2010 organised a joint exhibition with other Japanese artists called Le Japon Parano (Paranoid Japan).

By mixing manga and print, Ichiba’s universe straddles hallucinatory nightmare, madness and eroticism, creating a fantastic and chaotic universe where humans transform into strange animalistic beings with grotesque features and faces. The sparing use of colour helps accentuate the detail in his drawings.

Often referred to, along with Kei Nemoto, as one of the most grotesque of Japanese artists, he has not been particularly active in commercial magazines, but is widely appreciated both locally in Tokyo and internationally, mainly in France and the United States.

Daisuke Ichiba’s Instgram account, where he regularly shows new work, can be found here, and his minimalist website (mostly in Japanese) is here.