Profile:

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 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 in Brussels, Belgium since 2004. Reiko’s 25 solo and 28 group exhibitions have been held in Japan, England, USA, Poland, Slovakia, Russia, China, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, Czech with more future exhibitions worldwide.

Reiko's series of photographic work, entitled "Dreamscapes" has been exhibited in more than 11 countries (18 cities) between 2005 and 2011. Her first monograph catalogue, 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.

Reiko has a unique eye and her works look mysterious and surreal, yet the subject matter that she captures are 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 only can 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 would suggest multiple meanings of secrets in the human mind, and she is also aiming to communicate with a mind’s eye of the viewer in front of her creation. Her art and photo 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 is full of riddles and ambiguity. Unsolved mysteries attract me a lot… and, I think that’s the origin of my creativity.”