ABOUT
Biography
Ibuki Kuramochi is an interdisciplinary artist born in Japan.
She studied Butoh from Yoshito Ohno at the world-famous Kazuo Ohno Butoh Studio.
Ibuki's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, Taipei, and Rome.
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.
Her practice incorporates Butoh dance, performance, video, installation and painting, and is deeply rooted in the body, the resonance of thought and body, metamorphosis, and cyborg feminism.
She has lived and worked in the USA since 2019 with an artist visa.
Artist Statement
My works are mainly about physicality.
They exist in a variety of media, including video art, media art such as digital painting, performance art that encompasses Butoh dance, and painting.
Butoh, known as the "Dance of Darkness," was founded by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno after World War II as a means of re-establishing Japanese cultural identity. Butoh dance turned away from modernization and Western dance styles, and founded Butoh on unknown principles such as philosophy, the subconscious, primitive instincts, and ancient, incomprehensible myths.
Also, in the world of Butoh, even today, the ideal of perfection of the male body is rooted in the patriarchal culture of Japan.
(As the second sex).
I will critique these patriarchal physicalities with an exploration of the phenomenal body, the womb, and the female body, which emerge anew in conjunction with the concept of cyborg-feminism and technology.
My work is also deeply influenced by Sigmund Freud's Id.
Id is one of the terms used to describe human mental functions, and refers to instinctive desires and physiological impulses.
I have a sleep disorder, and I have nightmares every night. These violent dream experiences stand out in my work as visceral representations.
These unconsciously and consciously extracted “Id” have a consistent physicality.
It is an eroticism pregnant with sexuality, mutability, melting, and compatibility.
The eroticism of sexuality, transformation, melting, compatibility, etc., the crossover of spirit and body between membranes, and the materialization of the body through the escape of the spirit from the body.
My work evokes a break from the oblivion of the body in today's virtual world, and an awakening to a new physicality extracted from the media.