Denys Rzhavskyi

Denys Rzhavskyi began in cinema. In the 2010s he led the Ukrainian Film Association, working to develop the national film industry — the campaigns, the distribution, the argument that Ukrainian film deserved its own audience. A 2013 interview in KP.UA captures the tone of that chapter: "Now it is finally possible to fall in love with our cinema." The film years taught him the two crafts he never put down: how a story is built, and how a frame is kept clean.

In 2018 he founded Happy People (Счастливые люди) and released the album "Dataism" on the Masterskaya label — spoken word over electronics, in a genre the band named themselves: crypto-pop. The record argued with its decade — blockchain, code, Harari's dataism — in the voice of poetry rather than punditry. A year later came the collaboration that entered the history books: «Почему не падает небо» (2019), released together with Boris Grebenshchikov — a reworking of a 1978 Aquarium song, made with his blessing and his cameo. The single is listed in Grebenshchikov's own Wikipedia discography. The band's orbit grew: The Maneken on «Воин пришёл» (2020), releases with My, Лолита Косс, Таро; an Italian-language alias, Persone Felici; and the soundtrack «Благая весть!» for LEVGENIY — a film Denys conceived and co-authored with director Asya Nikolaeva.

Kintsugi is the Japanese craft of mending broken pottery with gold, so the seam shows. Denys took the craft as a method: he repairs objects, and he works the same way with images, songs, and people's stories — not concealing the break, but making it the strongest line in the work. This is the identity he is known by: the Master of Kintsugi. Out of it grew Kintsugi Gallery, which represents the painter Evgeniy Lapchenko — whose "Garden of Earthly Delights" hangs in the 906 World Cultural Center in San Francisco — and the Dataism Temple, a slow, curated on-chain gallery.

In 2025 he began again, alone, as R愛 — a name that joins "I / я / ja" with the Japanese 愛, love. The debut single "I BASHO" (January 2025) carries his songwriter and producer credits; "YESNESS" followed. Zen poetry over electronic textures; he calls the spirit "new samurai."

In 2026 he published his first book — "SHI · A Way of Seeing": four pillars (love, death, time, presence), short chapters, each ending in a single sentence to carry with you. Not philosophy, not doctrine — optics. The book grew out of four conversations recorded at night, for no one; it now exists in English, Ukrainian, Russian, and Spanish editions, sold worldwide.

Today everything he makes lives in one place — The Best Place: painting and edition, music and book, the touch game SHI, the Temple, the gallery. Different rooms of one house, kept slowly. Care over noise.