Kyoko Ibe started her artistic creation using handmade paper at a time when the material was used exclusively for traditional Japanese arts and crafts. After completing a Masters degree at the Kyoto Institute of Technology in 1967, Ibe continued working with paper and has been invited to more than twenty countries for exhibitions, workshops, lectures, teaching, and as a jury member. Her work pushes the limits of paper, transforming a craft into an art form. She also creates large scale installations, a wide range of interior products, stage sets, and costumes. Ibe's radically new approach to paper combines a respect for tradition with technological experimentation.
Born in Nagoya, in 1941, Kyoko Ibe first worked with washi-traditional Japanese hand-made paper-during the 1960s. She is now one of Japan's most senior and respected artists in the medium, creating site-specific installations and theater sets that can fill large architectural spaces, as well as more domestic-scale panels and folding screens fashioned out of dyed and pulped antique documents originally brushed with handwriting in sumi ink.
These panels and screens combine multiple layers of representation and metaphor. In one sense almost pictorial, they can evoke the night sky, a stormy sea, or a distant mountain range, but each of them also powerfully conveys the artist's conviction that pre-industrial handmade paper is far superior to its contemporary counterpart and, just like old timber, grows ever more beautiful with the passage of time. Ink that was brushed onto the original documents makes an important contribution, surviving the dyeing and pulping processes to infuse Ibe's compositions with varying shades of gray that contribute to a unique aesthetic.
Appointed by the Japanese Government as a Special Advisor for Cultural Exchange, Ibe has worked in many parts of the world as an international ambassador for washi and is well known in the United States for her installations and stage designs. Her solo show "Washi Tales: The Paper Art of Ibe Kyoko" was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011 and in 2016 New York's Asia Society presented "Recycling: Washi Tales," a theatrical performance around four tales of paper making, in which Ibe's work played a prominent role.
She has collaborated with many foreign theater groups, and received an Isadora Duncun Visual Design Award for the stage set of Tandy Beal Company in 1987. She recently had a solo exhibition at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, where she was an adjunct professor. She has received many awards, nationally and internationally; and was selected to be a Cultural Ambassador in 2009 by the Agency of Cultural Affairs of Japan. She is a professor at the Kyoto Institute of Technology and a director for the Japan Paper Academy.