Saeko Ehara (Japanese, b. 1985) is an artist and VJ based in Tokyo who combines AI, 3D animation, and generative code with imagery of jewels, flowers, and anime-inspired motifs she describes as kirakira, or sparkling, in her work.,,,Her audiovisual installations respond in real time to music, and she has also released her work as NFTs, moving image, and physical prints.,
Ehara studied oil painting at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague, graduating in 2010, then returned to Tokyo to work as a VJ for concerts.,She began learning creative coding at Digital Hollywood in Tokyo in 2020, and started minting her own NFTs on the platform Foundation once the pandemic halted her concert work.,,By 2022 she was among a cohort of Japanese artists establishing a foothold in the NFT space, producing “video works of sparkling euphoria”.For “Bright Moments Tokyo” in 2023, part of its The Japanese Contemporary Collection, she produced 100 artworks as a single collection for the first time.,
In 2024, for “Patterns of Flow” at NEORT++ in Tokyo and Feral File, she made the series Synergistic Metropolis, combining Stable Diffusion and TouchDesigner to depict a dazzling night drive through the city, inspired by Hiroshi Kawano's Artificial Mondrian and Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie.That year she also made Daily Narratives, using ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion to reimagine everyday scenes captured on her phone, shown at Becoming Art in Jeju, South Korea.In 2025 she made Body Without Presence for “FEMGEN” in Paris, training an AI model on images of the traditional Japanese dances Awa Odori, Yosakoi, and Bon Odori, then distorting the generated bodies through ComfyUI and TouchDesigner until the dancers dissolve into a single abstract form. Inspired by Analivia Cordeiro's computer-choreographed dances, Ehara has said the dissolution evokes the loss of individual identity amid the constant self-generation of digital and social media life.The series showed at Artverse in Paris and online via Fellowship, paired with historic works from the Le Random collection by Cordeiro, Nancy Burson, Copper Giloth, and Vera Molnar.
By 2023, Ehara was represented by √K Contemporary in Tokyo, where she held the solo exhibition “Van Gogh X Japan” at Theater of Digital Art, Dubai.,In 2025 she collaborated with Shuta Yasukochi on “Artificial Dreams II” at the Grand Palais Immersif in Paris, and held the solo exhibition “Luminous Utopia” at Galerie Glaab in Bern, Switzerland.,
