Bio
Shane Keisuke Berkery (b. 1992, Tokyo) is a London-based figurative painter who holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art. Berkery’s practice is informed by his mixed heritage and attends to cultural ambivalence and the construction of selfhood in the contemporary world.
He is a recipient of the Hennessy-Craig Award from the Royal Hibernian Academy, and his work is held in the Irish State Collection as well as significant private collections. Berkery has exhibited across Ireland, the UK, Sweden, France, Spain, Singapore, the USA, and China, with presentations at the National Gallery of Ireland and the National Portrait Gallery, London, and a forthcoming solo exhibition with Carl Kostyál in April 2026.
Artist statement
At the core of my practice is a deep interest in how our sense of self is constructed. As we move through the world, we internalise lived experience alongside cultural narratives, literature, cinema, and the constant flow of mediated images, all of which become reference points for how we understand and project ourselves. For me, selfhood is not fixed but continually assembled through a shifting matrix of fact, fiction, memory, and representation.
Having spent my formative years across the United States, Japan, and Ireland, I became acutely aware that the self is shaped in relation to its surroundings, adapting to different social codes, histories, and expectations. That experience remains central to my work and underpins my interest in the instability of how we see and define ourselves. In the present condition, where screen culture is fully integrated into consciousness, the images that shape us have become more immediate, more persuasive, and more difficult to separate from lived reality.
My paintings respond to this condition by treating image-making as a site where private perception, cultural myth, and shared reality can meet, blur, and be reconfigured.