Reiko Shimizu
Five Million Incidents

About the Actant

Reiko Shimizu was born in Japan and is the granddaughter of a Buddhist monk. At the age of fourteen, she was sent to the USA for high school, after which, she studied fine art in New York City. After some  years back in Japan she decided to travel to India, where she met her present husband. She moved to Brazil and built a family. When her four sons reached their teenage years, they moved back to India. Living in India again since 2012 Reiko has been questing for a spiritual life and education. In all the countries she has lived in, she has never stopped producing art, and always in consonance with the phases of her life. While the manner of approaching and pursuing  art has changed from time to time, the main theme has remained the same: the essence of life.

Blind Art began with Reiko organizing art classes for the Blind Boys Academy. “What does visual art mean for a blind person?”, she has asked herself, out of which grew the idea of creating a space for blind boys and others to explore creative process together. An open experience through creating art. An enriching experience involving varieties of people to exchange, understand, learn, share, accept, expand and break a paradigm. More questions emerged, for instance: What is it like to not have visual sense in this visually overloaded world? What does the visual sense do to us as individuals? As a society? And what about other senses? Reiko hopes the audience can help answering these questions with the experience acquired through this incident.