When Ibuki Kuramochi’s body is tethered to an artificial womb, she seems to return to a place she remembers, but has never seen. She mutates in her performance, her face contorting in horror and arms trembling under a veil of pigment. Kuramochi's work occupies the liminal terrain between grief and genesis. Butoh, digital media, and painting become a deeply personal meditation on transformation, memory, and posthuman feminism.
Ibuki Kuramochi (b. Gunma, Japan) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is grounded in Butoh, the postwar “Dance of Darkness” that emerged as a radical response to Western modernity and trauma [1]. Since 2016, she has studied at the historic Kazuo Ohno Butoh Dance Studio in Yokohama under Yoshito Ohno, son of the form’s co-founder. Her practice extends beyond performance into painting, video, and digital installation, disciplines shaped by a childhood immersed in the arts in Japan and an early fascination with live painting. Now based in Los Angeles, Kuramochi’s work has been presented in New York, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, Taipei, and Rome, as well as across experimental and contemporary art spaces in Southern California, where she continues to investigate themes of memory, grief, kinship, and motherhood within an evolving posthuman framework.
Each gesture is choreographed instinctually, guided by what she calls “the body’s memory.” “Before I perform,” she says, “I build an emotional structure. But once I enter the space, I let the body think."
For Kuramochi, contemporary dance felt too ornamental, too concerned with aesthetics. Butoh, by contrast, emerged in post-war Japan precisely to challenge such aesthetic hierarchies [2], and it offered her an entry into dissolution rather than representation. Yoshito Ohno, she recalls, was a quiet and gentle leader, teaching through silence—unlike other Japanese men in the field, she discerns. Her first class required her to imagine herself as a fetus floating in her mother’s womb. “I cried. I felt like I had returned somewhere,” Kuramochi recalls. Butoh’s exercises, imagining decay, childhood, and rebirth, unified the body and the conscious.
She later connects this to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of la chair du monde, the flesh of the world [3]. “The performance is a code for transforming the body,” she explains. “The body becomes empty, and then it can be reborn. In that state, I don’t hold a fixed form.”
“In Butoh, the membrane between body and consciousness thins”, says Kuramochi. You sense the energy of space, of others, even of time itself.” Her movements carry the weight of trance and the stillness of prayer. “It is acting and not acting,” she says, a process in which the body traverses life and death.
The maternal body, both literal and metaphoric, threads through all of her work. For Kuramochi, the uterus is not an anatomical site but a conceptual matrix, a place where ideas, wounds and memories are born. “Mothering is a gesture,” she says. “It extends beyond reproduction. It is how we exist together.” This framework draws from Donna Haraway’s manifesto of companion species [4], the idea that kinship should expand beyond the human, which can include algorithms, ghosts, and animal species. “To care is also to be cared for,” Kuramochi says.
In Prenatal Memory and Species (2022), created after her grandmother’s death, Kuramochi used a silicone pregnant belly to explore the umbilical cord as both relic and lineage. The piece reflects Japan’s custom of preserving the cord as a talisman to reunite mother and child in the afterlife (Kuramochi, 2022).
“That dried little cellular substance,” she writes, “contains both cyborgness and primordial life.” Quoting Haraway, she adds, “Cyborgs are not born… they have a matrix” (Kuramochi, 2022). Her installations often fuse the mechanical and maternal, the ancient and synthetic, underscoring what it means to mother. Yet the work was not only an inquiry into ancestry, but into the right to call oneself a mother. In conversations with a close friend, a mother of three, Kuramochi is told that she “isn’t a mother,” that her dog “isn’t a child,” and that she cannot claim a maternal identity. The exchange pushed her to question whether motherhood must be biological, and which beings, living or digital, are worthy of being mothered.
Questions of gender, tradition, and digital identity converge in HUMAN PERFORMER (2022).
Wearing the sacred Okina mask historically restricted to male Noh performers [5], she overlays AI-aged projections of her own face merging male, female, and machine. Traditionally a symbol of Japan’s patriarchal history, she embodies it with her own image. Through this, she questions the nature of being a man or human (Kuramochi, 2022). Her feminism is inherently Eastern—nuanced, quiet, resistant without spectacle. “Silence can be critique,” she notes. “The Japanese proverb says, ‘The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.’ It shapes how we speak.”
Beyond the corporeal, Kuramochi’s recent work explores AI and spirituality. We joked together on the idea of how AI is exhausted, it needs vacation too. Yet behind this humor lies a serious inquiry that we don’t feel confident answering: Can machines remember pain? Do they store emotion? Her fascination with care and technology traces back to childhood, when she tended her digital Tamagotchi. In the Japanese version, the creature dies and displays a gravestone; in the Western version, a UFO rescues it. She adored the follow-up series Tenshi-cchi, where the digital pet begins as a ghost before becoming an angel. “Even as a child, it taught me to think about living and dying.” She was so devastated when hers died that she couldn’t attend school.
Later, a friend in Tokyo commissioned her to create an interactive digital heaven for her late dog, a 3D space where users can feed, pet, and play with his avatar. “Seeing him again healed my heart,” she says. “Machines are more delicate than we think. They need care. They break if it rains; they fail with the wrong controller. We care for them more than we realize.” She wonders what it would mean to perform with algorithms: “What if algorithms could move like Butoh?”
Across painting, performance, and digital spaces, Kuramochi’s work remains profoundly sensory. Pigment, fabric, and skin form a vocabulary, where texture becomes language and movement becomes metaphysics. When asked what it means to “be” when she dances, she quietly says “It’s about trusting that the body knows more than the mind, that instinct is memory carried in the flesh.”
In Ibuki Kuramochi’s world, the body remembers, mutates, and dreams, even when made of circuits and code. What remains is not identity but becoming, an endless choreography of being and unbeing.
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Conducted & Written by Hyoeun Kang
Explore Kuramochi’s work: https://www.ibuki-kuramochi.com
Follow her Instagram: @ibuki_kuramochi
[ENDNOTE CITATION LIST]
[1] Butoh. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, n.d.
[2] Hardy, Jessica. “The Dance of Darkness: Inside the World of Japanese Butoh.” Atmos, 2024.
[3] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press, 1968.
[4] Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. University of Chicago Press, 2003.
[5] Endo, Jeanne Chizuko Nishimura. The Contemporary Female Noh Maskmaker: How Females Penetrated the Male-Dominated Art of Noh Maskmaking. University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 1999.