Fuko Ito was born and raised in Kobe, Japan where she developed her interests in image-making and storytelling through collecting printed matter including comics, graphic novels, picture books, and magazines. She moved to the US to study printmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received her BFA in 2014. She has recently graduated and received her MFA in Visual Art with an emphasis in Printmaking and Drawing from the University of Kansas.
Her work attempts to playfully explore and illuminate feelings of vulnerability and sensations of discomfort informed by her cross-cultural upbringing through her plushy, sentimental beings called fumblys. Fuko is driven to make work by imagining a world that is softer and more forgiving, as she reflects on the social implications and struggles of living among a community of emotional beings. The plushy world of fumblys is not a vision of a hopeless romantic but is a world of soft, affectionate sensations that exists in protest to the oftentimes unforgiving social structures that people live in.