Koji Ryui’s work is informed by the desire to transform our perception of the everyday, opening up a space of meditation and play. With each work, the spectator’s subjectivity activates a series of readings. The ambiguity of the sculptures elicits our empathy, which goes beyond the materiality of the work to open up a mental or psychological response. While Ryui often seeks the point of arrival of complex, essentially humanistic, ideas into his aggregated forms, the character of those ideas is decidedly cosmic. Ryui’s work underlines the impossibility of rationalising or verbalising all things in the world and invites the audience to explore it in a more intuitive, expanded and perceptive way.

With minimal gestures and a playful sensibility, his work activates the things of our everyday experience, sometimes to the point where they start to possess traits that we normally associate with sentient beings – desire, will, motivation and emotion. In his hands, the utilitarian stuff of the world takes on a flicker of life that is occasionally disconcerting. Informed by an animist philosophy and spirituality, his engagement
with materials and objects destabilises the border between animate and inanimate, seen and unseen.