Back to room
Previous Next

Ibuki Kuramochi

Corps sans Organes

Performance, mixed media, video

"The physicality lost through the pandemic has led me to a more digitally mediated physicality. To what extent do the rituals of digitally unmediated physicality and performance art find their somatic relevance for us living in the post-pandemic era? The Japanese scholar Michizo Noguchi proposed that 'The body’s main constituent is not the brain, it's the body fluids.'

I begin with the empty physicality of a fetus and encounter my reproductive organs (self). The paints used in the performance act like bodily fluids with the transforming landscape; I finally encounter and merge the detached organism with the body."

— Ibuki Kuramochi

About the artist

Ibuki Kuramochi

Ibuki Kuramochi is a Japanese-born interdisciplinary artist. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, Taipei, and Rome. Since 2016, she has studied the uniquely Japanese modern/contemporary dance Butoh from Yoshito Ohno at the world renowned Kazuo Ohno Butoh Dance Studio. Kuramochi visualizes her performances and body movements as two-dimensional works and video works, exploring the poetic choreographic physicality of Butoh dance and the human body in anatomy.

Kuramochi's artistic practice incorporates Butoh dance, performance, video, installation, and painting, and is deeply rooted in the body, the resonance of thought and body, metamorphosis and post-human feminism.

In 2019, she was featured as Artist of the Year on the front cover of LA WEEKLY's special issue " PEOPLE 2019”. Recent exhibitions include work at the Torrance Art Museum, New York Hall of Science, Spring Break Art Show LA, Craiova Art Museum Romania, and artist lectures at the art college in Tokyo and the NY Film Academy. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles

Image of artist