Ibuki Kuramochi performing

Photo courtesy of the artist

Damaris Athene: Could you just start off by telling me a bit about yourself?

Ibuki Kuramochi: I’m an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Japan. I obtained my artist visa in 2019 and moved to Los Angeles. I was born in rural Gunma Japan where my family owned a well established sake store. I grew up as an only child and my parents worked late, so when I got home from school I would eat alone and spend all my time drawing. I loved that alone time and I think it is what made me the artist I am today. For example, my ability to shoot my own videos, perform them myself and produce them all by myself, including costumes, makeup and editing. From an early age drawing and interacting with myself became an essential act in supporting my daily life. Also, when I was 12 years old, my family took a trip to Nara and Kyoto, and I still strongly remember being moved by the murals painted by the Japanese artist Ikuo Hirayama which were displayed at Yakushiji temple. It was an immersive exhibition in which the entire space was enveloped by the scenery of the Silk Road. Along with that impression, I strongly felt that I wanted to become an artist myself. When I was 18 years old, I entered art college and lived in Tokyo for about 10 years. While in school, I had the opportunity to go to an overseas study trip to Paris and London so I was exposed to art scenes overseas. I began to think that I wanted to work mainly internationally so I started studying English through online lessons. Soon afterwards, I had a solo exhibitions in New York and Taipei and began showing my work in other cities such as Sydney, Paris and Milan. Currently, I'm focusing on my activities in Los Angeles.

DA: Could you tell me a bit more about your practice?

IK: My work is mainly about physicality. I work in a variety of media including video art, media art, such as digital paintings, performance that incorporates Japanese Butoh dance and painting. Butoh is a Japanese modern dance form constructed after World War II. In the world of Butoh, the idea of the perfection of the male body as an ideal is still rooted in the patriarchal culture of Japan. I critique these patriarchal physicalities with an exploration of the phenomenal body, the uterus and the female body, which emerge anew in conjunction with the concept of cyborg-feminism and technology. In addition, now that the Internet has become widespread and pervasive, people's consciousness is drifting in the digital world, and as a way of breaking free from ‘forgetfulness of the body’, I have been creating and publishing video works related to the body in self imposed isolation, like a diary. My physicality, which appears online, is contracted, cut off, expanded, and metamorphosed into all kinds of forms that transcend time and space. The physicality extracted on the media screen is a dualistic phenomenon of ‘body without consciousness/ghost’ and ‘consciousness/ghost without the body’. My work evokes a departure from the oblivion of your physical body in today's virtual world and an awakening to a new physicality - a physicality extracted from the media.

Matrix, 2022, Video still
Image courtesy of the artist

DA: What draws you to work with different media.

IK: I use a variety of media, but with everything I am creating a painting. I started my artist career by painting and later I began to incorporate Butoh dance movements into my live paintings and further sublimated them as performance art. My transition to digital painting and video art production was deeply influenced by my experience with the pandemic. When I perform, I dance using the space as a canvas and myself as the paint. Currently, I feel that I have more possibilities in performance and digital art than in painting, which I have been doing for a long time. These are all connected. For me, digital painting and video art are the same process as painting on canvas.

DA: Could you expand on how you explore the body in your work?

IK: In the pursuit of physicality, I use performance movement and Butoh dance methods. These dances and movements are photographed, digitised, and transcribed into various forms beyond the framework of the body. The anatomy of the body, the mechanism of the skin, which is said to be the third brain, and all kinds of body imagery will be discussed. In addition to moving my own body, I have also started muscle training and recently started boxing. I am most inspired by the process of my body's response through physical training in dance and sports, and by my own encounters with new physicality.

DA: Could you tell me more about the history of Butoh dance?

IK: Butoh is known as the ‘dance of darkness’. It was founded by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno after World War II as a means of reestablishing Japan's cultural identity. Turning away from modernisation and Western dance styles, Butoh dance was founded on unknown principles such as philosophy, the subconscious, primal instincts, and ancient, unexplained myths. Butoh can be defined as a dance that pursues harmony/excess, beauty/ugliness, Western modernity/pre-modernity, formality/ emotion, extension/intensity, and the subversive beauty that can only be found in the latter. Unlike classical ballet, which is oriented toward the heavenly world through techniques such as leaping, this dance is oriented toward the lower world through its commitment to the floor and ground, its crab legs, and its low, bent hips.

Matrix, 2022, Video

Video courtesy of the artist

DA: How did you find out about it?

IK: Through one of my artist friends who advised me to go to the Ohno Butoh dance studio where I met Mr. Yoshito Ohno, the son of Kazuo Ohno, one of the founders of Butoh. When I first met him, I was overwhelmed by his quiet but intelligent aura. I still cannot forget the Butoh training I received which began with an encounter with space, we performed a dance called "greeting space”. The teacher led us through the theme ‘The space of the classroom is the inside of your mother's belly, and you are the foetus’. Each of the ideas of Butoh is connected to Eastern thought and philosophy, and its fundamental base includes the question, ‘What is life?’. The two founders, Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, had different styles like Yin and Yang. Kazuo Ohno was a Christian and pursued a dance rooted in Yang. In particular, Kazuo Ohno pursued mother worship and the connection between himself and the unborn child. I was very much influenced by the philosophy of Ohno’s Butoh. For example, in 2019, I did a performance at Orange County Center for Contemporary Art called ‘The Uterus’, a combination of Butoh and live painting. The circular transparent paper in the gallery represented the inside of the uterus, and the ropes attached to the body led to the ceiling representing the umbilical cord and the foetus. The performance symbolised the writhing of the foetus and the movement of blood in the uterus. My video work ‘Matrix’, exhibited at the Torrance Art Museum in March 2022, was about the uterus, ovulation, and the cyborg body. The Matrix is the maternal body, the uterus, which is also used in biology and medicine as the term ‘interstitial’. In this video performance piece, the focus is on the ‘essential difference’ that exists in the body, or corporeality. The egg in the video is a symbol of circulation time, identity, and heredity, while the flesh is a symbol of sexuality and physicality. Butoh dance is ritualistic and transformative, as well as a physical expression that moves between life and death, sexuality and asexuality. The different physicalities of the self that emerge through Butoh are at once transformative and cyborg. The onset of ovulation, the biological repetition of bodily difference, and the encounter with the endogenous cyborg that emerges at the intersection of internal identity and the ritual of internal difference.

DA: That’s all fascinating, thank you! What impact has Sigmund Freud's work had on your own practice?

IK: When I first learned about the concept of ‘Id’ from reading Freud's dream diagnosis, I strongly felt that this concept was involved in the process of creating my work. The fundamental desire of ‘Id’ is the urge for sex and death, and when I make a video work, I consciously search for my ‘Id’ and output it as an image. When I make paintings, I output my ‘Id’ as if I were swimming unconsciously. These unconsciously and consciously extracted ‘Id’ consistently have a physicality. They include sexuality, transformability, fusibility, eroticism with interchangeability, and so on. I also have sleep disorders and have frequent nightmares. These violent dream experiences can appear in my work as visceral representations.

The Uterus, 2019, Performance at Orange County Center for Contemporary Art
Photo courtesy of the artist

DA: What is cyborg-feminism and how does that manifest in your practice?

IK: The Cyborg Manifesto is a paper published by Donna Haraway in 1985. The cyborg is a creature of a post gender society, and the image of the cyborg is the result of a condensation of both imagination and material reality. The cyborg has no precedent in the history of Western thought and is an entity that escapes patriarchal and capitalist constraints. Haraway's conception of the cyborg demonstrated an idea that transcended the oppression innate by gender difference, and this idea is not limited to machine technology, but has gained tremendous support even today by discussing feminism in broader terms, such as biology and the environment. I felt such a strong sympathy with these ideas constructed by Haraway that I could not separate my own art from them. For example, Haraway claims women of colour can be understood as a “cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesised from fusions of outsider identities." This shows the significance of my existence as a woman of colour creating art in the extremely white male-created world of contemporary American art scene. Also, I connect strongly with these two quotes, “From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war.” and "The cyborg has no mother, but has a matrix. It was not born in a garden, but in history." Butoh dance was built on the groundwork of post-World War II grief and hatred and hidden within that Butoh movement is a hidden political nature. I was born and raised in Japan, where patriarchy and contempt for women are very prevalent. It is true that even today, in the world of Butoh, there are many men who idealise the male body as perfect, and in this context I find the concept of cyborg feminism is necessary. This is because the cyborg is a creature of a post-gender society, a being that has no precedent in the history of Eastern or Western thought, and one that is exempt from patriarchal constraints. My video and digital painting works are particularly strong in cyborg feminism. When I create digital paintings, I film my Butoh movements and cut out my bodies. I also construct them by combining body parts from my other body image. Many viewers are surprised that the dancing movements are the source. The physicality created in the video works is pregnant with extensibility and melting that transcends the original body. My cyborg physicality, wandering on the digital, transcends the burden of tradition, the absurdity of gender, and these ties, and constructs a post-gender physicality.

DA: How do you usually work and how has that been affected by the pandemic?

IK: I usually work in my home studio. My digital paintings are created by recording my performing body on video and then digitally cutting and stitching those bodies together. Through the experience of the pandemic, I have become more aware of the relationship between my own body and the digital body or ghost. In the early days of the pandemic, I felt a sense of fear, as if I had lost my physicality as people's consciousness, including my own, converged online. I began making performance video works and posting them online almost daily, as if in a diary. My physicality, floating online, is very permanent. It can metamorphose into any form over time and space, contracting, being cut off, expanding, and so on. The pandemic experience awakened me to a variety of physicality and discovery, and I can say that 2020 was a very unique year.

DA: It's great that the pandemic gave you an opportunity to go deeper into what the digital body meant.

IK: Yes. Before that, I had never made digital work, especially video. It was a very good timing!

DA: Yeah! What would you like people to get from your work?

IK: I think it's two things. Number one is a physicality broken free from the patriarchy, and number two is the possibility of physicality.

DA: I definitely get that from your work. Have you had any surprising or memorable reactions to your work?

IK: Before moving to the US, I was unsure if my expression would fit well into the American art scene. When I moved to the US from Japan in 2019 I was featured on the cover of the annual special issue of LA Weekly, LA's most famous magazine. I was very happy.

DA: That must have been a great confidence boost to know that your work would be accepted in America. Whose work inspires you?

Endocrine, 2021, Video still
Image courtesy of the artist

IK: Kayla Tange and Caroline Yoo, also based in Los Angeles, are artists I admire. As Asian women artists who also work in the US, I am moved and inspired by their work, which deconstructs patriarchy and challenges boundaries by using the female body image. I love the performance art of Shigeko Kubota of Gutai and the embodied performance art series of Carolee Schneemann. And of course, Donna Haraway.

DA: A great selection of artists there. What projects have you been working on recently?

IK: A group exhibition will be held at California State University, Los Angeles in June. I am currently working on that piece and recently completed a pilot video art piece leading up to it. The piece will reference evolution, fish, and the uterus.

DA: A very interesting combination! I’m intrigued to see how that ends up. What plans do you have for future work?

IK: This year I was selected as an ambassador member of Super Collider, an LA-based artist collective institute. Super Collider is a research institute focused on art, science and technology. I am looking forward to exhibiting my work and curating opportunities. This year, I will focus more on science and technology in my work.

DA: That sounds amazing. Thank you so much Ibuki. It's been lovely meeting you.

IK: Thank you so much.

Intradcrine, 2021, Video

Video courtesy of the artist