I am an interdisciplinary artist, born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, currently living and working in nyc.

When I was a child, I started to stage brief, runaway-from-home rituals. I usually packed my favorite toys in my special bag and escaped to just outside the house. My bag was my playground and became my portable home I could carry around with me. I still carry this restless temperament to run away from home and search for my own place to be.

In an effort to find my place, I create environments for habitation, large-scale bags, sculptural garments and masks that are like my nests/home and serve as protective gear. Interacting with those temporary shelters, I invent my own ritualistic play that revives my childhood experiences in Japan and interpret the influences of my culture, particularly its reverence for the natural environment.

Performing to enact those nests, I examine the non-hierarchical system of social insects, especially ants, and their biological altruistic characteristics within their female dominant society. I am interested in how a community could form and function where there’s no central power to thrive. In the process of investigating the world of social insects, I attempt to acknowledge my paradoxical phobia for insects and challenge my own vulnerability as a human, drawing a parallel with the life of an insect. Through my cathartic exploration in performance art, I disguise myself as an insect queen, performing a ritualistic play of surrendering her “powerless” body to the habitat while exposing the careful relationship between the powerless insect queen (a symbol of decentralized power) and her sterile workers (a key to the altruistic society).