青木 竜太AOKI Ryuta

In an era when social and geopolitical cleavages are laid bare, this art project reweaves Asia’s folk tales and myths, traditional performing and craft arts, and its pop- and sub-cultures through contemporary technologies and speculative, science-fiction perspectives. It builds both a methodology and a practice-oriented platform for investigating new, locality-specific futurisms that emerge from each nation, region, and people.

Each work is valued not only at the moment of exhibition but across the entire arc of its genesis—before, during, and after installation—this continuum being framed as a new poetics. By distilling the polymorphic intersections that constantly overlap and transform one another, the project repeatedly re-examines Asian Futurism.

Guided by the spirit of kintsugi—repairing fractures with gold so the object returns stronger and more radiant—it seeks to reconnect the rifts wrought by history, politics, capital, and today’s information environment through artistic practice, thereby opening a pathway to creative solidarity.

Ryuta Aoki is a Tokyo-based artist and independent curator working at the intersection of art and technoscience. His practice traces the outlines of possible societies by making invisible structures—fictional mechanisms, cognitive and semiotic systems, algorithms, institutions, and ecological processes—tangible and open to critical intervention.

Aoki’s work has been shown at Kitakyushu Art Festival (Japan, 2021), Chiba City Festival of Arts (Japan, 2021), The Year 2121: Futures In-Sight (Japan, 2021), Trusting the Unseen (Thailand, 2024), and AI·Human·Multiverse (South Korea, 2024), among others. He was the first Japanese artist to receive the Social Impact Award in the Art Division of the 25th Japan Media Arts Festival.

In 2020, he served as Creative Producer for the Agency for Cultural Affairs project Japan Media Arts Distributed Museum. The following year, he became Artistic Director of Jack into the Noösphere, an exhibition staged during Chiba City’s inaugural art festival. In 2022, under the Agency for Cultural Affairs project, he devised the core concept for an international art festival envisioned as the successor to the Japan Media Arts Festival, proposing a new framework and ecosystem for value creation at the intersection of media art and pop culture.