m/Other

IBUKI KURAMOCHI SOLO EXHIBITION

June 18 - July 31, 2025 Mon-Sat 12-6pm
Closed on Sundays & Holidays (June 19, July 4)

The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles
(5700 Wilshire Blvd., Ste 100, Los Angeles CA 90036)

Admission FREE

Opening Reception
7pm Wednesday, June 18
Please register HERE

ATTENTION: Google might show an incorrect location when searched only a part of the address. 
Please include the entire address and make sure it is directing you to Mid-City (NOT K-Town or Century City).

© Ibuki Kuramochi

m/Other is a meditation on kinship, the maternal principle, and Otherness—not as fixed categories, but as shifting, unstable forces. Moving between the human and non-human, organic and synthetic, Ibuki Kuramochi reimagines the maternal as a site of both intimacy and alienation, power and dissolution.

Rooted in post-human feminist thought and inspired by Donna Haraway’s philosophy of companion species, this exhibition draws on Japanese custom to ask: What does it mean to mother—not a child, but an idea, a creature, a memory, a wound?

Here, the uterus is not merely biological, but a conceptual matrix—a haunted space of inheritance, trauma, and transformation. The Japanese tradition of preserving the umbilical cord becomes a symbol of kinship that extends beyond bloodlines, into interspecies care and nonlinear histories.

Kuramochi’s practice is grounded in Butoh—a form born from postwar collapse—whose physical language functions as a code for navigating grief, mutation, and metamorphosis. Through video, performance, and installation, she invokes the body as a porous vessel entangled with memory, ancestry, and technology.

In m/Other, the figure of the mother flickers—ghost, cyborg, companion, absence. Among them is the artist’s aging dog, whose presence, tender and temporary, informs the exhibition’s meditation on care. The “/” signals rupture and multiplicity, opening space for fragmented lineages and speculative kinships.

m/Other invites us to mourn, remember, and reimagine what care might mean now—across generations, species, and time.

© Ibuki Kuramochi

IBUKI KURAMOCHI is a Japanese-born interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, Taipei, and Rome.

Since 2016, she has studied Butoh under Yoshito Ohno at the world-renowned Kazuo Ohno Butoh Dance Studio. Kuramochi translates the poetic choreographic physicality of Butoh and the human body into performance, video, installation, and painting, exploring metamorphosis and post-human feminism.

She is a recipient of the 2025 AHL Foundation AAPI Woman Artist Fellowship, 2024 DCA EMPOWERMENT grant, 2024 DCA Dance in the City grant, and the 2022 SCIART Ambassador Fellowship.

In 2019, she was featured in LA WEEKLY’s People 2019 issue, highlighting influential creatives in Los Angeles. In 2025, she was named one of the Ten Essential Local Artists in LA by Los Angeles Magazine.

© Ibuki Kuramochi