RENA KUDOH

Artist ISSUE 3 2025 AW

Rena Kudoh’s works seem to exist at the boundary between the familiar and the unknown. Born from this ambiguous space, they radiate an unforgettable, powerful presence and impact. Kudoh is a nomadic artist, creating and working while residing in various locations. Although she considers establishing a studio in the future, a life centered around a single base remains unimaginable for her. How do these unique forms come into being? What daily life does she lead, and what thoughts drive her to keep creating? We explore the essence of her approach, which overturns fixed concepts and presents new perspectives.

Kudoh asserts that she never made a concrete decision to become an artist. “I cannot imagine myself not creating something,” she states. “Not creating is not an option.” Her introduction to art began in kindergarten when her grandmother’s cousin, a person who drew beautiful pictures with colored pencils, lent her some art supplies. While studying Western Painting at Tohoku University of Art and Design, she encountered clay during a shared workshop and espouses the material’s transformative effect: “When I first touched the pottery clay, I felt something fateful—‘This is it!’ It was more like the clay chose me.” For six months after graduating, she worked as a research student, borrowing the university studio. Relying on the fundamentals learned during the shared workshops, she created works guided by her own intuition. Subsequently, she participated in an Artist in Residence Programe at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Shiga Prefecture. This led to residencies not only in Japan but also overseas, where she met numerous artists. While fundamentally self-taught, she acquired knowledge by observing and learning from them.

Continuing to paint and draw, she became utterly captivated by clay. Regarding ceramics, she remarks, “The way it’s fired affects the color in countless ways, and the variety of glazes is infinite. Naturally, there are also countless types of clay, so it never grows tiresome. Clay is profoundly deep; one could spend a lifetime exploring it and still not exhaust its mysteries.” 

The creative process begins when she visits a new place and strolls around. The stimuli she encounters are unconsciously projected in her work. “Honestly, I don’t realize it while I’m making it, but afterwards it clicks,” she says. “It might resemble that cat I often saw on a street corner.” The stimuli absorbed in a new city become memories that connect to the work. She also receives influence from the people with whom she spends time. “My work reflects my surroundings. It doesn’t spring solely from within; I go to different places, meet various people, have diverse experiences, and these are reflected in my work without my realizing it. Occasionally, the emotions I felt at the time are reflected too.”

Where does the boundary lie between her creative activity and daily life? She loves walking, often strolling even in the middle of the night. Walking through the city is her primary source of input. Her cycle of input and output is much faster than most people’s, a trait she describes as “a rather high metabolic rate.” For instance, she might create work even while watching Netflix. Stimuli from the screen flow directly into her work, with ideas and expression circulating simultaneously. Her primary method of input is “seeing and touching being the greatest stimuli,” and the most potent sensation is “seeing.” Furthermore, regarding the act of seeing, she sometimes experiences a strange, unsettling sensation, a sort of conditioned reflex. For her, vision is a sense deeply intertwined not merely with information, but also with physical reactions. 

Recently, she learned a surprising fact during a conversation with her mother. “My mother has always been highly psychic, and the spiritual entities she saw bore a striking resemblance to the sculptures I create. For instance, she once saw an ‘entity with abnormally long legs,’ and around that very time, I was also creating sculptures with elongated legs.” This suggests her input may not have been limited to visual perception; she might have unconsciously picked up on the energetic impressions her mother received.

In 2022, she participated in the “Young Artists Support Programme Voyage” at the Sugimura Jun Museum of Art in Shiogama City, Miyagi Prefecture, where she presented a collaborative work with her mother. Her mother, Liang, originally from China and a cook by trade, served Chinese dishes on ceramics made by Kudoh in a video piece. After her mother began living alone in Miyagi and the pandemic made overseas creative activities difficult, Kudoh began returning frequently to visit her. The increased time spent together naturally kindled her interests in her mother, leading to their collaborative work.

In 2024, as part of a project marking the 1,300th anniversary of the founding of Mutsu Kokufu Tagajō castle, she presented ceramic sculptures with themes of “Impermanence,” “Trend,” and “Coexistence.” Large-scale works are installed outdoors in Tagajō City. Each piece has a written title, which is itself quite intriguing. Regarding these titles, she explains she “consciously avoided directness, aiming instead for a sense reminiscent of a multidimensional universe.” The distance is neither too great nor too close; the ambiguous yet certain sensation of “seeming unclear yet somehow understood” is what she finds fascinating.

How do her character-like, animal-like forms come into being? “I don’t draw with the intention of creating them, but they often emerge from the drawing process itself,” she explains. The characteristic long limbs are shapes that naturally appear as her hands move. Since childhood, she has been fascinated by insects and crustaceans, and the distinctive features she finds cool are etched into her memory. This extends beyond living things; she similarly remembers inorganic objects with wheels as being cool, and these elements are reflected without distinction. She creates freely, driven by what she herself wishes to see, obsessing over the coolness of the object, its color palette, and every detail, emphasizing that the face and expression are paramount. These forms emerge from a blend of her memories, the stimuli of the cities she visits, and the influence of the people she encounters.

Kudoh has many artist and potter friends across Japan. When visiting a city, she uses local clay and borrows kilns to fire her work. When asked if she’d always been the type to have many  friends, she replied, “I only truly understood that people have emotions when I was in junior high. I was rather poor at noticing the fluctuations in people’s hearts. So in high school and university, I didn’t have many friends and rarely looked outward. But now, I’m gradually changing; it feels like the synapses in my head are disconnecting. Ultimately, I realized my preconceptions were entirely wrong. Now, I genuinely find being with people enjoyable.” She shared this in her characteristically modern and unique way.

When asked about new projects, she mentioned “plans to participate in an artist-in-residence program in Mexico later this year.” The work she intends to create is a video piece on the theme of “dogs and death.” While “death” might seem like a heavy subject, Mexico has a festival called the Day of the Dead where the deceased are remembered and the joy of life is shared. This cultural openness toward death is why she chose Mexico for this project. She recounted that when her childhood dog passed away, due to her parents’ work they couldn’t bury it for about a week, during which she stayed with the dog. She experienced a vision then; she couldn’t understand its meaning at the time, and still can’t fully explain it, but it remains a powerful memory. Recently, the dog of someone close to her also passed away, causing that memory to resurface more vividly. “I considered making a ceramic piece,” she says, “but I want to create a video work for this theme. Film cannot be made alone, so I wish to create it by collaborating with various people.”

She fears neither ambiguity nor uncertainty, finding new forms within them. Free from hesitation or pretension, her pure and inquisitive nature makes her a strong, liberated, and captivating presence.