Mikko Ijäs was born in Jyväskylä, Finland in 1978. He is a Doctor of Arts student in the University of Arts and Design Helsinki, where he received a Masters of Arts degree in visual culture in 2006. Ijäs's works are in several collections and his works has been shown in several private and group shows in Finland and abroad. In the year 2003 he worked at the Polaroid 20x24 Studio in New York City. Lately his work has been shown in Federcultura, Rome, Italy and Mänttä Art Festival 2007. The last major solo exhibition Ijäs had in Jyväskylä Art Museum in 2005. Currently he lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. Ijäs’s work involves conceptual paintings, photographs and installations. The work deals with romantic, individualistic and liberal conceptions of identity. The themes he is using in his work are often visualized through contradictions.

Ijäs's new body of work is called The Mikko Ijäs Collection of Vincent Van Gogh and Walt Disney. The work involves replicas of historical objects and imaginary collector items. The work could be described as cultural criticism, with focus on cultural myths and fetishes. The concepts are presented through metaphors. Ijäs works with two key metaphors, which are the identities of Vincent van Gogh and Walt Disney. They function on a level of metaphor as examples of contradictory identity representations. The first identity representation is primarily a sacrificial victim, and the second commercial producer, successful conqueror. Their identities are defined both by the exceptional artwork they produced, but also by the extraordinary lives they lived. In Ijäs’s body of work (or the collection, as Ijäs puts it) Vincent van Gogh functions as a metaphor of death, destruction and also as a metaphor of museum. Walt Disney is presented through the multilateral possibilities of interpretations of the fairytale characters as seen in Disney’s movies.

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