Born in 1979 in Saitama, Japan, Shohei Takasaki lived in Portland, USA for 7 years before settling in Sydney in 2021, where he continues to live and work.

Using an array of mediums ranging from oil pastels, charcoal, and paint to found objects and fabric, Takasaki's works depict recognizable subjects and abstracted motifs in bold colors, lines, and forms. Human figures and still-life scenes make up the core of Takasaki's current practice, often featuring recurring imagery related to gender, violence, domesticity, and the cycle of birth and death. Although the things he depicts change in tandem with his constantly evolving interests, subjects such as flames, daggers, wildly overgrown plants, grids, plates of food, and the occasional egg or skull can often be found amidst the heads and bodies that populate many of his recent works, sometimes morphing from simplified shapes into pieces of complete abstraction.

These images, as well as his style of depicting them, emerge from a simultaneous love for and rejection of the world around him. Takasaki's deep interest in past movements and current-day culture (ranging from Automatism to punk rock music) serves as the reverse side of a heavy scepticism towards predetermined meaning. This push and pull between curiosity for the existing world and desire for total freedom fuels the direction of his practice. Rejecting the use of the image as a symbol for history or logic, Takasaki channels his thoughts and experiences of daily life directly into his paintings, drawings, and sculptures. In this way, his works serve as a purposeful act of rebellion against historical and societal constructs, placing the visual image outside of the cage of inherited definitions and turning it into a gateway towards a direct, autonomous experience of the world.

Takasaki's work has been exhibited across Los Angeles, Portland, Kuwait, Sydney, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Taipei, Beijing, and Tokyo, and is also in the public collections of the Starbucks headquarters in Seattle, The Hoxton Hotel in Portland, and Sakura Color Products Corporation in Osaka Japan. Since 2020, he has been running the independent interview media Destroy Your Habits in collaboration with Eri Takane, the current director of Tokyo Gendai.