Rui Kudo

Artist Statement

I am a contemporary Japanese artist who creates multimedia installations centered on photography, exploring themes of life and death, loss, memory, identity, and solidarity. By quietly observing the intersections of multiple cultures in everyday life, I focus on extracting fragments of societal and individual relationships, distortions, contradictions, and absurdities within this chaos, and then reconstructing these relationships. In my work, I incorporate narrative and poetic expression, elevating deeply personal experiences into universal themes, and connecting them to broader social issues. For example, in the work series of “blue, grey, wind”, I explore the return to trauma, the layering and disconnection of memories, and the relationship between nature and humanity, based on my experience of re-encountering the trauma of the Great East Japan Earthquake, which I experienced 13 years ago, on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland. The waves I saw on Lewis Island overlapped with the tsunami, and the landscapes of Lewis unconsciously merged with the post-disaster landscapes in my mind. I deconstruct this phenomenon, abstracting it by blending fact and fiction into a narrative.