ABOUT
Biography
Born in Japan, Artist IBUKI KURAMOCHI specializes in artworks for exhibition
(paintings and media arts),
and also specializes in live performances combining her live painting with her Japanese Butoh dance.
From 2012, Ibuki started exhibiting works in major cities in Japan, U.S.A.,Taiwan, France, Italy and Australia.
She studied Butoh dance at the world renown Kazuo Ohno Butoh Dance Studio in Yokohama in 2016.
Through her work, she pursues the physicality of Butoh’s poetic choreography and the pursuit of the human body in anatomy.
She visualizes her performance and body movements as two-dimensional works and video works.
Ibuki explores concepts of the body, thought and physical resonance, metamorphosis,
Femininity and fetishism.
In 2019, Ibuki received a USA O-1 artist visa.
She currently resides in Los Angeles.
Artist Statement
Physicality is the key point of my art’s theme.
My work exists in various media such as video works, performances and painting works.
The body is owned by every human being, but it is different for each person.
As anatomist Takeshi Yoro says, "There is nothing more personal than your own body”.
Each body is born to and owned by each individual, and is completely original.
Also,I have few experiences of sleeping comfortably at night, and I often have nightmares which I remember well after waking up.
Most of the nightmares are like a strange, violent and weird film.
I believe that these dream experiences have directly influenced my work, and that the visual experiences that I see every night are inevitably the essence of my work. Also, in my dream experience, the "Id" in Sigmund Freud is exposed.
(The Id is the primitive and instinctive component of personality.
It consists of all the inherited, ((i.e. biological components of personality present at birth)), including the sex ((life)) instinct – Eros ((which contains the libido)), and the aggressive ((death)) instinct - Thanatos.)
When I’m creating a video, I consciously discover my own "Id" and output it.
In the case of creating my paintings, I subconsciously discover my own "Id" and output it. That process feels like swimming.
These subconscious and conscious extracted "Id" have a consistent physicality.
I can say that my video work represents the output of Id’s body sensation ,and my painting work represents the output of Id’s brain sensation.
I’m also inspired by things that involve sexuality such as masculine and feminine, transformation, meltability, and compatibility.
Also, the sorcerous elements and attachments in fetishism are like stretching the desires of the body. Sometimes things become a substitute for the body.
Also life and death come and go on the side of that fetishism / eroticism.
For example, the mind and the body move between the membranes, or the body escapes from the body and materializes.
Under the pandemic, all human relationships are now concentrated in the virtual world through the Internet.
People’s thoughts, remarks, and lives appear in our vision which forms into photographs, movies, letters, and become a huge timeline.
My work evokes and awakens the oblivion of the physical body in the current virtual world.