Teppei Takeda

Teppei Takeda was born in 1978 in Yamagata City, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan. He graduated from Musashino Art University in Tokyo in 2001 with a degree in Visual Communication Design and went on to work at the design office of graphic designer Makoto Saito. In 2005 he returned to Yamagata, studied resin and woodworking, and opened his own atelier there.

Around 2013 he began painting with the concept that defines his current practice: reproducing, in acrylic on paper mounted on panel, the physical appearance of an in-progress painting, including drips, taped borders, and unfinished passages, as a finished trompe-l'oeil object. After more than ten years of largely private work, he held his first solo exhibition, Painting and Painting, That Painting and That Painting, at KUGURU in Yamagata in 2016. In 2019 he made his Tokyo debut with the solo exhibition Paintings of Painting at Maho Kubota Gallery, shown concurrently at the Tokyo bookshop and gallery Morioka Shoten, and published his first monograph of the same title with United Vagabonds. He has continued to show with Maho Kubota Gallery, including Recent Works in 2022 and FLOWERS in 2024, the latter accompanied by a second book. He continues to maintain his studio practice in Yamagata.

Coverage of Takeda has come mainly from design and contemporary art outlets describing the technical illusion at the center of his work, including features in Spoon & Tamago and Contemporary Art Curator Magazine, alongside gallery and hotel-commissioned profiles. His paintings have entered a small number of notable private collections in Japan, including the SMILES collection, the OKETA collection, United Arrows, and the Yusaku Maezawa Collection, as well as the public collection of the Arario Museum in Seoul. No major national or international art prizes have been documented for him to date, and no exact, attributable critical quotation from a named critic at a major outlet could be verified for this profile.

Takeda's market is young and still developing an international auction history. His confirmed auction high is Painting of Painting 026, which sold for HKD 1,841,500 (about USD 235,000) at Phillips in Hong Kong on 31 May 2024, well above a presale estimate of HKD 200,000 to 300,000, and marking his international auction debut. A Singapore Business Review report, citing a Phillips specialist, described this Hong Kong result as the artist's second-highest auction price at the time, implying an earlier, higher-priced sale in Japan; the details of that reported sale could not be confirmed with confidence from available sources, so no specific figure is cited here. Additional secondary-market sales denominated in yen have surfaced at Japanese auction houses in 2024 and 2025, pointing to growing domestic demand, though verified US-dollar equivalents of those specific results do not exceed the Phillips figure based on currently available data. Outside of these results, his market runs primarily through Maho Kubota Gallery, which has represented him since his 2019 Tokyo debut.

Takeda's public sale record is thin, resting on a single widely reported international auction result from 2024 plus a small, harder-to-verify set of yen-denominated sales in Japan, so any single data point should be treated with caution rather than as a stable trend line. There is no catalogue raisonne, which places extra weight on provenance and on verification through Maho Kubota Gallery, his primary representative since 2019. The split between a dollar-denominated Hong Kong auction market and a yen-denominated domestic Japanese one is also worth watching, since the two currently tell somewhat different stories about demand, and secondary reporting suggests the Hong Kong figure may not be his single highest price to date.