Biography

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Ibuki Kuramochi is a Japanese-born interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, Taipei, and Rome.

Since 2016, she has studied Butoh under Yoshito Ohno at the world-renowned Kazuo Ohno Butoh Dance Studio. Kuramochi translates the poetic choreographic physicality of Butoh and the human body into performance, video, installation, and painting, exploring metamorphosis and post-human feminism.

She is a recipient of the 2025 AHL Foundation AAPI Woman Artist Fellowship, 2024 DCA EMPOWERMENT grant, 2024 DCA Dance in the City grant, and the 2022 SCIART Ambassador Fellowship.

In 2019, she was featured as Artist of the Year on the cover of LA WEEKLY' featured as PEOPLE 2019. In 2025, she was named one of the Ten Essential Local Artists in LA by Los Angeles Magazine.

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Artist Statement 
 

My interdisciplinary art practice centers on the expressive potential of the human body through video art, digital painting, and Butoh-based performance. Rooted in a critique of patriarchal ideals, my work reimagines the female form as a site of power, vulnerability, and transformation.

I examine the uterus not only as a biological organ, but as a conceptual space—a matrix of memory, grief, care, and resistance. Influenced by the dance practice of Kazuo Ohno, I draw from Butoh’s deeply emotional and embodied language to reclaim the figure of the mother within a feminist context. This reclamation is not about idealizing motherhood, but about returning it to the female body, rethinking its presence, absence, and symbolic weight.

Informed by post-human feminism, my work explores the intersections of physicality, technology, and the nonhuman. Through themes of mutability, agency, and bodily transformation, I create performances and images that reflect the porous boundaries of identity and care, offering an alternative vision of the body—one that invites reflection on gender, kinship, and the politics of embodiment and uses the code of Butoh dance to explore how the female body sees the world through the womb.


 

Butoh Dance:

Butoh emerged in 1960s Japan as a response to war trauma, rapid modernization, and Western cultural dominance. Co-founded by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, it was originally called Ankoku Butoh—“dance of darkness.” Rooted in Japan’s cultural memory, Butoh rejected Western dance ideals, offering a raw, transformative language of the body.

Characterized by slow movements, white body paint, and surreal imagery, Butoh explores vulnerability, internal states, and the unspeakable. Kazuo Ohno brought a poetic, spiritual depth to the form, drawing on wartime experiences and memories of his mother to create performances where grief, tenderness, and spirit came alive through movement.