EMI KUSANO

This exhibition marks the Japan debut of Kusano’s new series Ornament Survival, first unveiled to critical acclaim at Art Basel Hong Kong’s digital art sector, Zero10, in March 2026. Alongside new works that further develop the series, the exhibition also features signature pieces such as Office Ladies, offering an opportunity to trace the evolution of Kusano’s practice.

Kusano is a leading figure among a new generation of international digital artists, having established a distinctive position in the field. Long before AI-based expression became widespread, she was creating works using a customized AI model trained on her own imagery, presenting them at major institutions in Japan and abroad, including M+ and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Since the early emergence of NFTs as a new mode of circulation and reception for digital art, she has continued to produce and release work, and in recent years has expanded her practice beyond that framework to explore expressions that traverse the boundary between the physical and the digital. At Art Basel Hong Kong 2026’s Zero10 sector, she presented her first sculptural work, further demonstrating the breadth of her practice.

Ornament Survival now makes its Japan debut. In an age in which individuals are swept up in accelerating flows of information, the desire for recognition—both self-directed and from others—continues to proliferate without ever being fulfilled, becoming a resource within an information-capitalist society. Emotions are reduced to their surfaces, extracted as data, and ultimately replaced by technology, blurring even the contours of our existence. Today, as the nostalgia Kusano once felt for the Japanese culture of the 1980s and 1990s is itself consumed and reconfigured, the boundary between reality and fiction grows increasingly unstable.

In this series, Kusano transforms inner anguish and desire into creative energy. Positioning this as a model for women living in the present, she intertwines it with her own childhood longing for transformation, continuing to “survive = create” in order to construct a new realm of expression.

We invite you to experience a new phase in Emi Kusano’s practice.

Comment by Kensho Tambara (Curator)

The figures that recur in Kusano’s work; 80s Japanese pop idols, mahou-shoujo magical girls, nurses, receptionists, and other stylised feminine archetypes, did more than populate the visual culture of their time. For many girls growing up in Japan in the 1990s, they offered recognisable models through which transformation, visibility, and agency could be imagined. Yet their appeal was inseparable from highly coded forms of femininity within a male-dominated, post-bubble Japan, carrying expectations around appearance, desirability, and behavior. Amidst a growing trend in popular anime toward female protagonists who transform, or henshin (変身), as in franchises like Sailor Moon, these images held out the possibility that girls, too, could become something else. Even so, that possibility remained bound to familiar norms governing how femininity should appear and behave.

In her new series, Ornament Survival, Kusano approaches this tension from within. She has spoken of how she admired these images growing up, while also recognizing how they were shaped by gendered expectations and the male gaze. This dual position underpins the work. The figures she returns to are part of a visual environment that informed her sense of self, shaping how transformation, femininity, and agency were first encountered as lived experience.

Rather than resolving this tension, Kusano re-enters these images. Drawing on childhood play; dressing dolls, assigning roles, and staging scenes, she treats identity as something assembled through rehearsal rather than something fixed. At the centre of Ornament Survival is a body of AI-generated images in which she uses her own image to stage speculative selves. These images unfold as a sequence of attempts, each adjusting familiar roles through shifts in styling, posture, and context. What emerges is not a set of parallel what-if universes, but a continuous recomposition of culturally learned roles. The central sculpture taking the form of an enlarged toy makeup compact, echoes the transformation devices from magical girl culture and reinforces this element of childhood play.

In Kusano’s hands, the use of generative AI continues a lifelong process through which identity is formed in relation to existing images. At the same time, her use of a model trained on her own face and body marks a decisive shift: the self is rendered into a form that can be repeated, modified, and scaled, approaching what she describes as a “standard” within a system. What is rehearsed here is not only identity, but its conversion into data. By engaging how these forms persist through repetition, Kusano opens onto a broader question: how images continue to instruct the self as they circulate with unprecedented speed and intimacy, and how identity is continuously adjusted to remain visible and legible, where appearance becomes a site of negotiation, and where performing these forms begins to resemble a means of survival.