Biography

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Ibuki Kuramochi is a Japanese-born interdisciplinary artist whose work has been performed and 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 and installation, exploring metamorphosis, transformation, and post-human feminism.

Her works have been presented at the Torrance Art Museum, the Craiova Art Museum, and as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide presented by the Getty. In 2025, she held a large-scale solo video installation at the Japan Foundation Los Angeles. Kuramochi has given artist lectures and Butoh workshops at the New York Film Academy, Philosophical Research Society in LA, and the art colleges in Tokyo.

She is a recipient of the 2025 AHL Foundation AAPI Woman Artist Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts GRANT, the NYFA Robert Rauschenberg Grant, the 2024 DCA Empowerment Grant, the 2024 DCA Dance in the City Grant, and the 2022 SCIART Ambassador Fellowship.  

Her work and interviews have been featured in Whitehot Magazine, CURATE LA, AUTRE Magazine, and ArtRabbit. In 2019, she was featured as Artist of the Year on the cover of LA WEEKLY’s PEOPLE 2019 issue, and in 2025, she was named one of the Ten Essential Local Artists in Los Angeles 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 radical response to war trauma, rapid modernization, and the dominance of Western cultural norms. Co-founded by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, it was initially known as Ankoku Butoh—the “dance of darkness.” Rooted in Japan’s cultural memory and postwar body, Butoh rejected the aesthetic ideals of Western dance, instead offering a raw, transformative language of the body.

Characterized by slow, often grotesque or hyper-controlled movements, white body paint, and surreal, dreamlike imagery, Butoh explores vulnerability, interior states, and the unspeakable. Kazuo Ohno brought a deeply poetic and spiritual dimension to the form, channeling memories of his mother and his wartime experiences into performances where grief, tenderness, and spirit moved through the body as presence.