Koichi KIMURA
1976－, Kyoto Prefecture
Kimura has loved manga and anime since childhood. During his elementary school years, he became interested in Japanese folk monsters, or yokai, influenced by the late manga artist, Shigeru Mizuki, and began drawing his own original monsters. He started drawing pictures of yokai, and from around a decade ago, he began making three-dimensional palm-sized works using ceramic clay. The humorous shapes are characterised by combining multiple parts of the human body?each piece taking about five minutes to create. With the shapes of the yokai monsters changing slightly from season to season, he produces several hundred pieces a year.