Look at an image of Aiku Kurotaki’s wool sculpture “Human 1” (2024), and it’s clear that the young Kawasaki-born artist is proficient at weaving. But if you continue to follow the thread, so to speak, the small worlds woven into his work begin to unravel.
Kurotaki has a penchant for looking beyond the surface of things and zooming in on the structures contained within them. Having first taken an interest in the composition of fabrics, Kurotaki was training in textile design at Tokyo Zokei University when he turned his attention to the human form and started questioning what lies under the skin — that is, what constitutes a human.
His research and reading led him from cells (of which it is estimated that we have, on average, over 37 trillion each) and molecules to atoms and subatomic particles. Investigating what might lurk beneath this sub-microscopic level of matter, Kurotaki encountered string theory, which conceptualizes subatomic particles as infinitesimal strings vibrating in fixed patterns. The theory has raised eyebrows — and continues to do so — in the scientific community, but for Kurotaki, there was a clear analogy to be drawn to the process of weaving fabric, specifically the movement of the horizontal weft threads, which criss-cross in and out of the vertical warp threads — vibrating, as it were — over and over to form a textile.
That the universe might actually be composed of tiny strings is, understandably, an intriguing proposition for a weaver, but Kurotaki’s musings didn’t stop there. The subsequent notion that these strings aren’t technically made of anything, as they’re the fundamental thing that makes up everything else, sent him down a philosophical rabbit hole, the waypoints of which included the notion of emptiness, particularly in a Buddhist context, as well as the dualistic forces of yin and yang.
Zooming out and viewing all of this from a macro perspective, Kurotaki began to think about the life cycles of nature and the perpetual flitting between existence (“1”) and non-existence (“0”) that we know to be true. Be it the blooming and withering of flowers or the birth and death of planets, the idea that the world is running on a loop of 0’s and 1’s seemed to carry even more credence when considered alongside the increasingly dominant role of the computer, which, at its core, uses binary code (i.e. a series of 0’s and 1’s) to store and process data. Perhaps it was a case of frequency illusion, but Kurotaki couldn’t help but plot the undulating curves of woven threads (and, by extension, the strings in string theory) according to this 0-1 pattern as well.
Expressing these two representations of the universe — both string theory and the 0-1 pattern — through weaving thus struck Kurotaki as an ideal confluence of medium and concept, and its centrality to his artistic practice is made clear in the titles of his artwork (n.b. “Human 1”) and, further still, the title of his first solo exhibition, “From 0 to 1,” which was held at Tokyo’s Som Gallery this spring.
Having also shown his work at Som Gallery’s booth at Art Osaka this summer, Kurotaki is now represented by the gallery and is expanding his “Human” series to incorporate new materials and perspectives.
The next opportunity to see one of his “Humans” in the flesh will be at Lurf Gallery in Daikanyama. Take a close look, and it might just get under your skin.
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