Saki Matsumoto is an illustrator and graphic designer based in Prague and Tokyo. She studied graphic design and animal biology and has worked at the Nippon Design Center and other studios in Tokyo. She completed a course at Central Saint Martins University in London and studied in the Illustration and Graphic Design studio at UMPRUM. She is an Adobe Creative Residency fellow, a member of the Tokyo Illustrators Society, People of Print (UK), and the Hollar Association (CZ), and serves as the Czech Goodwill Ambassador to Japan. She collaborates with the Čierne diery association, which promotes Slovak industrial and modernist architecture. 

Her work is often inspired by tradition, animism, nature, mythology, intercultural themes, life, and death. At Xao, she will exhibit her prints and paintings, which are based on real places and events combined with fantastical or mythological elements. Many motifs stem from seasonal events from all over the world. Places that Saki visited and liked, or where she felt a special connection, served as a mysterious source of inspiration and offered her the opportunity for abstract imagination in her vibrant, life-filled paintings.

Carnival in Roztoky with visitors wearing traditional masks from Japan—the iconic giant bear from Roztoky meets a fox. Stalls selling flowers and traditional dishes can be seen at the Iranian spring festival Nowruz. Various illustrations depict the story of a little bird searching for a city where it can settle down—it visits a market in Morocco, Mikulov, a Czech forest, a metal workshop in Bratislava… Where will we go next?