Kazutomo Suzuki / 鈴木 和智
Born in 1996. Entered the School of Education at the University of Tsukuba in 2015. In 2017, founded LES WORLD, an organization that travels to orphanages and slums around the world to create musicals and film projects together with local children. The organization was incorporated as an NPO the following year, and over the past eight years has collaborated with more than 2,200 children across 12 countries (https://lesworld.org/). Since 2020, it has also hosted music festivals and performance-based events within Japan, co-creating works with over 3,500 participants.
Independently, the artist has also been active in web design and development since 2018, and began a gardening business in 2023 focused on public facilities in Aichi Prefecture.
Since 2020, the artist has opened their home as a shared living space, welcoming people from across the country. Around the same time, they began engaging in the arts, practicing through painting and installation. In 2023, following the suicide of their mother, they began to explore the artistic significance of relationships and events that emerge within the everyday rhythms of a shared home. Their current work centers on the subtle occurrences that arise in the interstices of daily life.
Statement
― Why is it so hard for people just to be with one another?
This question lies at the very root of my practice. I believe that our “relations” are quietly approaching their own demise. Beyond attitudes of deconstruction or perpetual critique of the Other, I seek to propose an alternative way of being.
The origin of this question is deeply connected to my own experience of “home,” reconstructed after the suicide of my mother. By opening my house as a shared living space, I came to live together with strangers, sharing meals and everyday life. Amid frictions and imbalances, there were fleeting moments in which the boundaries between self and other dissolved, and we practiced a form of “co-being.” What emerged there were not pre-designed events, but subtle shifts and presences—lived occurrences that arose simply from sharing the same space. I came to realize that this is something our world is quietly losing.
Contemporary society is saturated with anonymous violence, the deprivation of embodied presence, selves optimized for unconscious forms of control, information bubbles that isolate individuals, and exclusionary rhetoric. As Hartmut Rosa argues, an “accelerated and operative society” has fully arrived, and we are moving ever closer toward “alienation.(Hegel)”
Precisely for this reason, we must once again reexamine the possibility of lived relations.
Borrowing the words of Édouard Glissant, I call this a “Poetics of Relation.” It refers to a framework in which relations and co-being arise as pre-linguistic presences and occurrences, and to a theory and practice that seeks to enact such moments. It marks a shift from the traditional focus on relations as “given” toward relations as “happening.” Within this shift, the weights of established art institutions move from “spectating” to “co-being,” from “thinking” to “sensing,” and from “recordability” to “transformability.” The generation of events with strong situatedness brings forth non-recordability—a vitality that alters its form the very moment it is observed—within the exhibition space.
My practice is neither an escape from institutions nor a simple critique from the outside. Rather, it is an attempt to introduce a crack from within. What I envision is not a “deconstruction of critique,” but an alternative experiential possibility that can be generated and lived within the institution itself.
It is not deconstruction, but re-relationality—a form of constructive critique that simultaneously proposes a new mode of art-making and raises a universal question to society at large.
To be with one another—this act itself can become an alternative, yet critical, counteraction to the world and to art.
In an age shadowed by visible divisions, it is crucial to create spaces that reweave relations, and to encounter those pure moments where the distinction between self and other ceases to matter.
This, I believe, is the very role that a contemporary Poetics of Relation must fulfill in art today.
Brief History
1996 born in Aichi, Japan
2015 enter University of Tsukuba
2017 establish “the traveling entertainment troupe” LES WORLD
2020 start the career as an artist
Past Shows
2021/03/03-07 Kyoto Kyocera Art Museum.(competition, won 2 prizes)
2021/04/19-26 session 2021｜Ginza Art Point.(group)
2021/08/13 Saatchi Gallery, LONDON.(group)
2021/08/16-22 FOLD Gallery, LONDON.(group)
2021/11/09-14 SOLO show I am Dancing in the Water (Nine Gallery, Tokyo)
Archives
2020~ 《家》
2022/05/01-04 “an Encounter”.
2022/09/04-07 “aida”
2023/05/04-07 “a forest – communus”
2024/05/03-06 Once the glass is filled and the water spills onto the earth, we can no longer tell it apart from the world.
2024/10/11 a diner
2025/05/03-06 I found it(you).
Awards
2021/03 Sosho Mochida Awards, AIDS Achievement Award (Kyoto Kyocera Art Museum)
©kazutomo suzuki, All Rights Reserved.