Reiko Imoto was born and grew up in Kobe, Japan and she found her love of art during early childhood. She started photography in 1993 when she was given her father’s old 35mm SLR camera. Reiko left Japan in 1994, and she has lived in Ireland, England, and the U.S.A. where she earned a Master’s degree of Fine Art in photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design, in Georgia, in 2002. She has been living and working as an artist in Brussels, Belgium since 2004, having solo and group exhibitions, publications, and lectures with slideshows in Europe, the USA, and Japan.
Reiko’s 25 solo and 28 group exhibitions have been held in Japan, England, USA, Poland, Slovakia, Russia, China, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, and the Czech Republic with more future exhibitions worldwide. Reiko’s series of work, entitled “Dreamscapes” has been exhibited in 20 cities in 11 countries between 2005 and 2012. Her first monographcatalogue, also entitled “Dreamscapes”, was published for traveling shows in Poland in 2007. Reiko’s works and interviews have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers internationally, and she has won several grants and awards including the Best Portfolio Award at the “International Portfolio Review” in Bratislava, Slovakia in 2004.
Her series, “Visions of the Other Side” is Reiko’s most surrealistic work, and has been exhibited in the USA (Savannah, GA), Poland (Lodz), Belgium (Brussels), and Switzerland (Oberwil) between 2002 and 2010, and some of the prints were selected for the “Art Collection of F. Hoffmann – La Roche AG”, Basel, Switzerland in 2010. The series entitled “Time Traveler’s Diary” has also been exhibited in the USA (San Antonio, TX), France (Lacoste) and Czech Republic (Cheb and Prague) between 2008 and 2010. Reiko has been longing to publish the “Visions of the Other Side” series as a book for many years, and here the dream comes true, together with the “Time Traveler’s Diary” series in this book, published by KANT in Prague, Czech Republic in 2011.
Reiko has a unique eye and her works look mysterious and surreal, yet the subject matter is captured from her everyday life. Inspired by her own inner reality, subconscious world, dreams, childhood memories, psychology, Surrealist paintings and films, fairytales, music, poetry, and every single ordinary thing she sees that give her many perspectives. She is mostly interested in things which we can only see when our eyes are closed, such as dreams, memories, imagination, and so on. Reiko is aiming to express her own psyche through her “visual poetry” which suggests multiple meanings of secrets in the human mind, and she is also aiming to communicate with the viewer’s mind’s eye in front of her creation. Her works reveal questions about seeing “realities” rather than revealing concrete answers. She says, “As an artist and a photographer, it is pure joy for me to visualize the atmosphere of invisible things, but at the same time, it is also like playing an unknown game in which I’m working to make poetry, and it’s full of riddles and ambiguity. Unsolved mysteries attract me a lot… and I think that’s the origin of my creativity.”
