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Rie Okabayashi’s works transcend conventional definition.

Her art is not so much a product as it is a mission.

The designs that flow from her hands create spaces unto themselves rather than merely existing prettily, solipsistically. She suggests, almost psychedelically, a more perfect world full of wonder and light, not in some distant universe but right there in front of you concurrent with your experience of her forms.

Almost magically, everything about her art and her ethos is contained within a simple but elegant sigil of black ink habitually spilled across whichever medium she pleases: her signature. Like a codex made of tendrils of smoke, it sits silent and suggestive, adorning album covers or glass doors or canvases, staring deeply out at the world around it and its inhabitants, begging to be translated.

Brash and stoic, I don’t think that her world is easily approached. Observed, yes. Appreciated, absolutely.

But her signature, signifier of her art and being, is so full of life that it is actually difficult, painful even, to behold, so overflowing with positive energy it is.

Rie’s creations are blissful bombs of encoded anecdotes.

They do not chortle metaphorically about the grandeur of existence like world weary cherubs; they do not take their patrons on casual strolls through heady gardens of technique. No, they are loud, boisterous, even, and demand only one thing of the audience: immediate joy.

Golden halos entwined with slender, sable whisps hijacked from the written word, luminously vibrating and impatient to break free into some higher yet-defined plane of temporality. This convivial, visual violence, this ironic aggression, is her signature, both literally and figuratively, and it is so arrogant but charismatic for its demands for demands that one cannot immediately call it their own but do follow its gesticulations.

With Infinity Prana, we see her jubilation explode into three dimensions, unleashed to slather themselves across all instances of reality. It is not a message that Infinity Prana espouses, and I don’t think it is an action, either, though that occurred to me at first. It is a conflagration, a fire of light, insisting that the world bask in its joyful, heartful, loving warmth.  

The resplendent whorls building up energy as they bob and weave amongst the many others; the diffuse light softening the hard edges of the frame, casting expansive, expressive shadows; the sheer scale of the pieces themselves, looming simultaneously large and numerous.

Infinity Prana is an orchestra of exultation, beaming gleefully out into the world and announcing a new state of being overflowing with joy.

This is the lifeforce at work behind Rie and on display with Infinity Prana, and it is a powerful, caring, one indeed.

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​Matthew Ketchum