Luna Ikuta

Luna Ikuta is a conceptual artist whose work is influenced by biology, material science, and media. Her background in industrial design influenced her interest in learning how things are made. From her experience working as a designer, Ikuta has an appreciation for material properties and their characteristics that impact our perceived value of design objects and environments. Her inspiration for art draws from how people interact with our modern world, and creates installations that reflect on universal questions and societal patterns.  

Luna’s work is multidisciplinary and spans across many practices ranging from aquascaping, scent, sculpture, installations, and digital art. 

Using the skills she’s developed over the years in fabrication and design, she has shaped her career in building worlds around esoteric concepts. In her works, Ikuta narrates stories to communicate nuanced themes such as memory, evolution, identity, rebirth, and the afterlife.

Her signature “ghostly” flowers is an ongoing exploration of decellularized transparent botanicals arranged as underwater landscapes. This practice is a hybrid of science, aquascaping, and biology that uses plant tissue preserved as ghostly scaffolds of their original anatomy. Though each transparent plant takes three weeks to produce, these artworks are temporary as the plants gradually disintegrated after a few months. Due to the ephemeral nature of the artworks, she began archiving them on film. Drawn to the archival nature of digital artwork, and began minting them as NFTs in 2020 as the blockchain mirrored concepts of data preservation.   

Luna’s widely popular open edition NFT “Remember Me” was claimed 39,000 times and “broke” OpenSea when the artist swapped a video with a series of images. This project was among the first to explore the concept of time through blockchain technology.