Ryoichi Kurokawa^JP

Japanese artist, Ryoichi Kurokawa composes in sound and light, using analog and digitally generated materials to create time-bending audiovisual installations, video screenings, audio recordings and performances that melt multi-channel image and sound into one entity, existing in continual evolution.

Kurokawa has always looked to nature for inspiration, exploring the realizations that emerge when our lived, observed physical realities meet electronically interpreted realities. He began experimenting with synaesthesia in audiovisual installations in the 1990s, overlapping senses of sound, sight and touch in installation and performance. His inquisitive style lead him to integrate scientific research on matter, time and the nature of the universe into his work—recently collaborating directly with astrophysicists on work informed by stellar formations, for ad/ab Atom, an installation of booming drones and static paired with multiple flickering screens – an abstract journey through the microverse, fed by nano-scientific data, images and code. His recent elementum series of digital and natural prints reorganizes life, death and (re)birth using the “oshibana” flower-pressing method. For over a decade, Kurokawa has shown his groundbreaking work in solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world and at esteemed international festivals. A self-taught artist and musician, he's collaborated with musicians Ryuchi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi of Yellow Magic Orchestra as well as techno artists Aoki Takamasa and Yoshihiro Hanno.

Kurokawa continues to pursue the relationship between nature and the manufactured world in his North American premiere of subassemblies at MUTEK. A concert, art installation, sculpture exhibition and screening, subassemblies is ultimately an architectural project based on 3D data of building ruins and the encroaching nature that surrounds them. Kurokawa distorts and reconstructs that data to render rebuilt architecture that floats between nature and human-made, abstract and concrete—an in-motion hybrid reality that, through its layers of order and disorder, renews history's accepted timeline and exposes the forces of nature and art for their combined possibilities.