Leiko Ikemura is a contemporary Japanese painter. Best known for her hazy depictions of dreamlike landscapes and disintegrated faces, Ikemura’s work strives to put the viewer in a place of uncertainty—where they are not sure what exactly they are looking at, yet still accept it as real. Since the mid-1990s, her works have depicted mainly female figures. “I think the female figure, as imagined by male artists, is frequently an idealized version of the female form and is always seductive in some way,” she explained of her decision to focus on the subject. “The way females naturally accept being modeled by conventions and social norms does not interest me.” Born in 1951 in Tsu, Japan, she went on to study at...