Member Events & Exchange Weekends

Curator Coffee and Chat - The Making of Shokkan

Akiko Takesue is the Bishop White Committee Curator of Japanese Art & Culture ROM. She is responsible for researching and developing the Museum’s Japanese collection of over 11,000 objects that covers most of the major areas of Japanese art and ranges from archaeology of the Jōmon period (10,000–300 BCE) to the present day. She is also involved in exhibition and program development, acquisitions, external collaborations, and donor cultivation.

Her major research interests lie in the reception and representation of Japanese art outside Japan from the nineteenth century to the present, and in how the historical discrepancies in the idea of “Japanese art” have been carried on until today. Most recently, she has curated an original exhibition Shokkan: Material Encounters in Japanese Art, currently on view at ROM until September 2026, and edited an accompanying publication Sense of Touch: Shokkan and Sensory Exploration in Japanese Art (ROM, 2026).

Featured artist in Shokkan: Material Encounters in Japanese Art

Kōsuke Ikeda is a Kyoto-based artist, writer, and adjunct lecturer at Ritsumeikan University and Kyoto University of Education. Working across painting and installation, his practice explores fluid and generative phenomena, ranging from the movement of water and energy to the brushstrokes of painting.

His major exhibitions include New Ways to Grow: Artists Envision a Post-COVID World (The University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts, 2021) and Regeneration Movement (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2016).

Alongside his artistic practice, Ikeda writes for art journals and critical publications. He is the author of In Search of Lost Thing: The Age of Uncertainty and Art (Seki Shobo, 2019). 

At the exhibition Shokkan: Material Encounters in Japanese Art, Ikeda presents a folding-screen work inspired by the proliferation of dividers that emerged throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. He also contributed the essay “In the Gaps between Folding Screens” to Sense of Touch: Shokkan and Sensory Exploration in Japanese Art (ROM, 2026).

A graduate of Columbia University, Colin Fleming collaborates with experts across the Museum to write everything from ad copy to magazine stories. He also developed the initial concept for the ROM-original exhibition Psychedelics: Art. Culture. Science. with Dr. Justin Jennings. 

His writing has appeared in Toronto Life, The Daily Beast, CBC, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among others.