Aki Inomata (あき いのまた Inomata Aki, born 1983) is a Japanese multidisciplinary contemporary artist and designer based in Tokyo.[1] Her work addresses identity and displacement, and questions societal boundaries between humans versus animals and the natural versus man-made worlds.[2] Much of her artistic practice aims at creating collaborative interspecies relationships through such contemporary modeling technologies as 3-D scanning and printing techniques. Inomata's cross-disciplinary Bio Art projects complicate the notion of production while proposing a new awareness of human and nonhuman ecologies, as she states: "The concept of my works is to get people to perceive the modes of life of various living creatures by experience a kind of empathy toward them."[3]
Born in Tokyo in 1983, Inomata grew up in a "forest of concrete buildings", and attributes her artistic influences to early experiences in greenspaces at schools and parks as respite in her childhood urban environment. Contact with animal and insect life in these spaces sparked Inomata's early interest in interspecies kinships.[4] Inomata graduated with an MFA in Intermedia Art from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2008, studying under artist Yoshiaki Watanabe.[5] As a student, Inomata experimented with sound installations and digital projections in order to engage natural environments in urban space, inspired by avant-garde Japanese playwright Jūrō Kara's theatrical technique of shakkei, or "borrowed scenery".[4] In 2013, she began working as a visiting researcher at Waseda University and in 2014 became a part-time Faculty of Art and Design lecturer at the Department of Informational Design at Tama Art University.[6] She was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2014 YouFab Global Creative Awards from Loftwork Inc.[7] In 2017, she lived in New York for three months as a recipient of an Individual Fellowship Grant with International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) from the Asian Cultural Council. Most recently, she has worked as a part-time lecturer at the Department of Art and Design, Joshibi University of Art and Design since 2019, and the Department of Sculpture at Musashino Art University since 2020.[8]
Inomata is best known for projects highlighting interspecies relationships and collaborations, often facilitated through complimenting natural animal processes with technological interventions. Departing from her early student work with technological simulations of natural environments, Inomata's breakthrough came through collaborations with nonhuman species as "co-creators".
For one of her best known early works, entitled Why Not Hand Over a "Shelter" to Hermit Crabs? (2009), Inomata utilized rapid prototyping and CT scanning to produce habitable 3D-printed plastic shells for hermit crabs decorated with cityscapes. The series explored themes of exchangeability, nationality, and immigration.[9] Inomata describes the inspiration for the piece coming from her participation in the group exhibition No Man's Land at the French Embassy of Japan in 2009, in which she learned of land possession agreements between the two countries: "This work was inspired by the fact that the land of the former French Embassy in Japan had been French until October 2009, and then became Japanese for the following fifty years, after which it will be returned to France. I was surprised to hear this story, and associated this image with the way that hermit crabs exchange shelters."[10] For her participation in No Man's Land, Inomata exhibited photographs of hermit crabs in her the clear resin sculptures of Tokyo housing complexes and Paris' Haussmann apartment buildings. Later iterations would include cityscapes and cosmopolitan landmarks such as Berlin's Reichstag and Beijing's Temple of Heaven. The use of hermit crabs plays off the Japanese term for the animal yadokari, which means a tenant or someone renting a home.[11] The hermit crabs' acceptance, inhabitation, and exchanges of the printed shells represents the swapping and crossing of cities and nationalities, especially for global migrants and refugees. Inomata created a follow-up work to the series Why Not Hand Over a "Shelter" to Hermit Crabs? under the subtitle White Chapel (2014–2015), with the printed structure of a wedding chapel from Japan. The work refers to the pop-up nature in Japanese cities of Christian chapels, stemming from the huge popularity of Western-style weddings in Japan despite only one percent of Japanese citizens identifying as Christian. The work identifies the remnants of postcolonialism in Japan through its eager adaptations of Western architectures, religious ceremonies, and cultural practices.[12] Resisting essentialist readings of identity, Inomata states of the work: "For hermit crabs, the shell is not a part of their own body. However, when we see hermit crabs, we identify them with their shells."
For Inomata's 2012 work Girl, girl, girl..., the artist spent two years raising bagworms, a species of moths which construct protective cases that male bagworms leave upon adulthood while females remain until they find male mates. Inomata's intervention involved cutting pieces of fabric from women's clothing and giving the strips to the bagworms to use in their casing. Giving pieces of colored paper to bagworms to construct colorful casings has also been a traditional game for Japanese children. Girl, girl, girl... was an installation of these bagworm casings, weaved by the bagworms with fashion fabric, and created to premier in women's department stores, as a commentary on gender discrepancies in pursuits of personal upkeep, fashion, and the development of a culture of hyper-consumerism.[13]
Other major artworks include the performance piece I Wear the Dog's Hair, and the Dog Wears My Hair, in which Inomata collected the hair of her dog Cielo over the course of several years, as well as her own hair, and created capes out of each other's respective hair.[14] In an act of "exchanging coats", Inomata highlights the co-development of human beings and their domesticated pets, having evolved alongside each other for centuries. At the same time, the work exposes uneven value assessments of animal life, the contradictions implicit in animal domestication, and complicates the idea of pet ownership. Human interventions in the breeding of domesticated animals, for instance, warps animal genetics to meet the needs of their owners: an exploitation of ecology that Inomata warns against.[15]
Ecological loss also factors significantly into Inomata's most recent work. In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, caused by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Inomata collaborated with Toho University marine scientists Kenji Okoshi and Masahiro Suzuki for the work Lines—Listening to the Growth Lines of Molluscan Shell (2015—). The project examines the growth lines and patterns of Fukushima's Asari clams. Considering the ways in which nonhuman, coastal creatures register ecological tragedy and upset, the artist transposed the clam growth lines onto disc records that could be played, thus the mollusks could be "heard". However, drawing attention to the problematics of anthropomorphizing nonhuman communications, Inomata notes gaps in the project: "The sound of this recording is not the clam's voice itself. However, perhaps within the sound, we may feel a fragment of the world the clams felt."[4] In 2020, Inomata was included at the New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition Broken Nature, with her moving-image work Think Evolution #1: Kiku-ishi (Ammonite) (2016–17) in which the artist fabricated a resin ammonite shell, a now-extinct cephalopod, from its fossils. Inomata then introduced a live octopus to the fabricated shell, which it promptly inhabited, allowing for the impossible meeting of both animal relatives across time.[16] The octopus is considered to be the shell-less modern evolution of the ammonite, known to use coconut shells and bivalves to protect its soft body.[11] These projects draw on notions of deep-time, mobility, temporality, and change.[11]
Inomata has exhibited widely in Japan and around the world. In late 2019, she presented her first solo exhibition, AKI INOMATA: Significant Otherness, in Japan at the Towada Art Center in Aomori Prefecture.[17] The title of the exhibition was derived from science historian Donna Haraway's publication, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness in which Haraway proposes the reinvention of human relationships with other living species on earth.[18] Working recently with oyster farms, in April 2021 Inomata staged a solo exhibition with Maho Kubota Gallery entitled Memory of Currency (2018—), featuring works inspired by pre-modern uses of seashells as currency. Using pearl cultivation methods, Inomata sculpted miniature models of several historic figures symbolic to national currencies, such as George Washington and Queen Elizabeth, and inserted them into live oysters from which "money fossils" made of nacre featuring the historic figures were produced. Inventing a new currency, Inomata's intervention into the natural processes of oyster's pearl production and recording in multichannel video probes human ascriptions of value to both natural resources and currencies, as well as humanity's dependence on the natural world.[19]
As one of three finalists for the 2020–21 Contemporary Art Foundation Artist Award, Inomata opened a solo exhibition in which she exhibited her new work How to Carve a Sculpture at the Contemporary Art Foundation in Roppongi, Tokyo. For the work, Inomata employed beavers at Japanese zoos to gnaw on several logs, producing animal-made sculptural forms. In an earlier iteration of the series for the 2018 Thailand Biennale, Thai stone-cutters were then commissioned to replicate the wooden forms created by the beavers, which were then installed around a pond to evoke the beavers' habitat.[10] In the series' latest iteration, Inomata employed automated CNC-machines, which produce rotary-blade nicks similar to the bite marks of the beavers, to carve the logs. The series in its multiple iterations complicates notions of artistic authorship, the human, animal and technological hand.
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2017 – "Shutoko Expressway Fine Art Collection" – O Art Museum, Tokyo
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