Yuko Kamei | About

About

Yuko Kamei is a Tokyo-based contemporary artist whose practice investigates how thought emerges through physical existence. Working across photography, drawing, and sculptural objects, she explores the human body not as a symbolic form but as a material system—composed of water, minerals, and proteins—continuously shaped by forces such as gravity, pressure, balance, and resistance.

Kamei’s inquiry is informed by her background in contemporary dance, ranging from classical ballet to postmodern dance, particularly contact improvisation. These practices cultivate a sensitivity to gravity, weight, and momentum, where movement arises through responsiveness rather than premeditation. Beyond dance, she extends this inquiry through activities such as skateboarding and surfing, situating the body within unstable and ever-changing conditions. These activities require an attunement to external forces rather than domination over them: movement occurs through negotiation, alignment, and precise resistance. She is particularly interested in moments when reflex precedes conscious decision-making, revealing cognition as an emergent property of continuous material interaction.

Kamei’s photographic practice examines these embodied events as temporal and material thresholds. Rather than documenting action as a fixed moment, her images operate as sites where movement, duration, and matter momentarily converge. Through photography and drawing, she investigates how physical actions—shaped by forces often imperceptible in real time—can be suspended, translated, and reconfigured within visual space. Sculptural objects function both as agents within these actions and as independent works that extend the inquiry into three-dimensional space. Whether embedded within photographic compositions or presented alongside images in exhibitions, these objects register traces of contact, pressure, and alignment. Across media, Kamei treats perception not as passive observation but as an active process shaped by time, force, and material encounter.

In her recent works, Kamei shifts her focus from the human body toward material processes themselves, employing sculptural objects as substitutes for bodily presence. Using everyday substances such as gelatin and dough, she places abstract structures and familiar forms under unstable conditions of nature, where heat, gravity, and time act as formative forces. Rather than seeking verification or control, her practice situates bodies, materials, and environments within shared physical laws, treating structure, precision, and intention as propositions exposed to transformation. Across media, Kamei attends to scale and energy as conditions that shape both matter and perception, cultivating a mode of attention grounded in wonder—an openness that acknowledges continuity between the human body and the material world it inhabits.

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