Ilan Derech

Ilan Derech is a photographer and filmmaker from Mexico who lives in Tokyo. He came to photography and video from motion graphics, 3D design and generative code. He left Mexico at the end of 2019 to travel through Asia, and in 2020 a short stop in Tokyo turned into a long stay when the pandemic closed borders. Japan became his home, and wabi-sabi, ma and ukiyo-e prints now shape how he frames a scene.

Much of his work is shot in Tokyo at night, among neon signs, rain and passing faces, and some of it, like Tokyo's Midnight, a 2023 edition with PROOF Collective, is cut as moving triptychs. On SuperRare he mints one of one films shot with an ARRI Alexa Mini in places such as Mount Fuji and Hirosaki, among them The Girl & The Swan. Satori (2023) is a set of 22 procedural animations of wind, fire and water in motion, several titled after painters such as Van Gogh and Rothko.

Fellowship showed Wabi-Sabi Syntax, a series of 88 works, in a solo online exhibition in July 2025. For it he fed his own photographs into AI models to see how a machine would read them. The pictures came back like ukiyo-e woodblock prints, always slightly wrong, and he kept those errors as part of the work, a picture of the friction between his Mexican roots and his life in Japan.

The Francisco Carolinum museum in Linz holds Prayer of Silence (2025), from his series Moments Between Stillness. His videos were projection mapped at the Non Fungible Conference in Lisbon in 2024 and shown on a large screen at Tour First in Paris in 2025. ZEISS, which supports him as a brand ambassador, commissioned him to photograph London at night for its 2024 story Capturing mobility.