PHILOSOPHY
Ayelu
Ayelu（和える） is an artistic practice exploring how different people, materials, cultures, histories, bodies, and spaces can coexist, encounter one another, and generate new relationships while retaining their differences.
PRACTICE
KOKI SUGITA’s practice moves across calligraphy, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and spatial works. Rather than being defined by a particular medium, his practice begins with the encounter between different forms of knowledge, materials, cultures, bodies, and spaces.
Calligraphy remains an important point of departure, while its language expands through encounters with traditional Japanese practices, contemporary art, technology, architecture, and social research.
Through these encounters, Sugita seeks to create new forms and relationships that could not emerge within a single discipline.
RESEARCH
Sugita’s research explores the relationships between difference, coexistence, and transformation.
His ongoing inquiries are organized around five areas: Matter, Gesture, Trace, Ritual, and Liminality.
From the physical properties of materials and the movements of the human body, to memories embedded in places, ritual practices, and the boundaries between different cultures, technologies, and spaces, each area approaches the question of how new relationships emerge when different things encounter one another.
These inquiries extend beyond the studio through fieldwork, collaboration, experimentation, and dialogue with artists, craftspeople, researchers, engineers, communities, and other practitioners.
MATTER
Exploring the relationships between humans and materials.
GESTURE
Exploring the body as a language.
TRACE
Exploring memories and traces left in people and places.
RITUAL
Exploring the relationship between art, ritual, and spirituality.
LIMINALITY
Exploring what emerges between different worlds.
