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
In a society where screen-mediated reality has become the norm, we are relentlessly worn down by a storm of countless assertions and conflicts, caught in a rain of “faceless relationships.” Anonymity grants people the power to negate and attack others, and in this disembodied communication, our human connections grow ever more tenuous. In this climate, I wish to once again pose a fundamental question: What does it mean to be together?
The origin of this inquiry lies in my own reimagined experience of “home,” following the suicide of my biological mother. I opened my house as a shared living space, where gathering around a table and sharing daily life with others became an act of “co-being.” In that space, despite friction and imbalance, we gradually dissolved the boundaries between ourselves and cultivated a practice of mutual presence. What emerged was not a pre-designed event, but rather “living phenomena/space”: subtle shifts and traces born from simply inhabiting the same place.
I have since expanded this practice beyond the home, into provisional communal living spaces in urban and natural settings. Rather than rejecting institutional concepts like “exhibition” or “artwork,” I have come to believe that bringing such lived practices into institutionalized contexts—like art museums and curated exhibitions—can open up poetic fissures within the framework of the art world itself. In this sense, my work seeks to present the everyday spaces where “being together” emerges as art in and of themselves.
In my practice, I do not install pre-fabricated artworks, but instead prepare an open space where visitors’ gestures and conversations quietly shape the meaning of the environment. The visual form is not the point; it is the non-performative, open-ended occurrences and the lived experience itself that constitute the work.
This is an attempt to find an aesthetics within the cracks of everyday life, outside the institution. The work is inherently irreproducible due to its transience—yet the sensations, traces, and practices sediment within the bodies of those present, forming the very substance of the space. Here, relationality is not fleeting but accumulates as a sustained, embodied presence.
This ethical structure resonates with the thought of Martin Buber’s I–Thou, Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm of perception, and Kitarō Nishida’s pure experience. It is in the crossing of sensations that precede language and meaning that a primordial relationality comes into being.
In this age marked by visible divisions, I believe the role of art is to create spaces where relations themselves may be rewoven—to encounter moments of pure and transparent connection in which the boundary between self and other is no longer necessary. Such practice, I believe, is what is now being asked of art.
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.