ARTISTS

Risa Ueno

Risa is a knitter, self-proclaimed ‘Tangled Witch’ who uses textile as a tool to interpret her ideas. By taking maths and science as guides, Risa’s practice considers communication with new mediums including edible materials using craft methods from hand to digital/machine to explore issues surrounding everyday life. After Risa trained at BA Textile Design, further her research practice was built at MA Art & Science, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Selected practices in shortlisted LVMH Maison 0 / This Earth Award(2023), Colechi journal issue 1 – AGREENCULTURE: Fashion and Farming(2023), LOADING…: Exhibition and Symposium(University of Oxford, 2025).

Kentaro Okumura

Kentaro Okumura (b. 1999) is an artist based between London and Tokyo, finished his MA in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. His practice spans various media and techniques, employing an Investigative Aesthetic to explore and problematize themes such as cartography, territorialization, translation, and technicity. Selected recent exhibitions include: “Central Saint Martins Post-Graduate Show” (2025, CSM, London), “See it, Say it, Unsorted” (2024, CSM Kings Cross, London), “Inter-sphere” (2024, biscuit gallery, Tokyo), “Artist Fair Kyoto 2022” (Kyoto Shimbun, Kyoto).

Sao Ohtake

Sao Ohtake (b. 2000, Japan; based in New York) is an installation artist whose practice explores the connections between herself, the places she inhabits, and the people within them. Her work examines how political tensions subtly shape everyday life and how individuals seek reconnection through dialogue and empathy. She is particularly drawn to moments when divergent values are bridged through nonverbal, tactile interaction. Using soft materials and sound, she creates sculptures and installations that invite physical and emotional engagement. Ohtake holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Master’s degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Dann Kurauchi

Born in Tokyo in 2003. After withdrawing from the Tokyo Metropolitan Senior High School of Fine Arts, Performing Arts & Classical Music, Dann Kurauchi enrolled at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, in 2021, and is set to graduate from the BA Fine Art Diploma in June 2025. During university, Kurauchi focused primarily on sculpture, painting, and video. Currently, his practice centers on photography and design, working across and integrating both fine art and other creative fields.

Hisako Nakaoka

Hisako Nakaoka (b. 1999) is a sound person based in Berlin and Tokyo. Driven by the narrative or fictional nature of sound recording and amplification techniques, she explores communication with space, time and others through sound. She received her BA in Music from the Department of Musical Creativity and the Environment, Faculty of Music at Tokyo University of the Arts in Tokyo. She currently studies at Sound Studies and Sonic Arts (MA), University of the Arts Berlin.

Neo Tomita

Born in Tokyo in 2003. After graduating from the sculpture department of the Tokyo Metropolitan Senior High School of the Arts in 2020, moved to London and is currently enrolled in the Central Saint Martins, BA Fine Art, 3D department. Main medium is classified as sculpture. Current practice focuses on expressing that which is exceptional or deviant(≠ minorities)—elements excluded from both historical narratives and personal subjectivity—as something sacred or aesthetic, through an acknowledgment of their comic nature. Recently, Neo has been developing essays and works centered on the ‘Jargonistic thing’, which he considers a practical embodiment of this approach.

Maya Erin Masuda

Maya Erin Masuda’s work revolves around cyborg ecosystems, planetary trauma, artificial life forms and queer ecologies. As an artist with particular focus on ecological intimacy, she’s been aiming to propose affective, sensual, intimate sites of knowledge production which interweave the non-human, the marginalized and the symbolic. Developing a kinship with the imperfect and political nature of technology, she work attempts to provide interspecies belonging and care across all beings, while suggesting an alternative future where natural, technological and artificial intertwine. She worked as a curator of Kyoto Art Centre CO-program 2023, writes critiques on Tokyo Art Beat, also works as the co-founder of the feminist-queer journal i+med(i/e)a. After Obtaining her MA from Royal College of Art (UK), she currently researches post-nuclear culture in relation to the reparative process of planetary trauma at Universitäｔ der Kü粮ste Berlin (DE). Her recent solo exhibitions include Ecologies of Closeness (YCAM – Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, 2025), Sleep, Lick, Leak, Deep… (Daiwa Japan Foundation London, 2024,UK), group shows includeTransmediale 2025(Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2025, DE), Ground Zero (Kyoto Art Center, JP, 2023),Constructing Utopia (Gallery XY Olomouc,2023,CZ) and more.

Ye Zijing

Zijing Ye (ヨウ・シジン / 叶子菁) is an artist whose space interventions explore the transformation of existence, fluid identities, and the ambiguity of borders. Working across sculpture, performance, and installation, she uses poetic materials—such as fish skin imprinted with passport stamps or 3D forms from vintage postcards—to reframe personal and political narratives. Rooted in her multicultural background, Ye’s practice interrogates how systems like nationality and migration control identity and freedom. Drawing from queer theory and posthumanist thought, she questions the binary frameworks of citizen/non-citizen, legal/illegal, and human/non-human. Her work often draws parallels between controlled environments—like farmed salmon—and constrained human mobility, seeking alternative, post-national ways of belonging. Currently studying Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, Ye has received the Batsford Prize (Fine Art)、 the Ezoe Recruit Foundation Scholarship, and the Kuma Foundation Scholarship.