Mariko Mori is a multidisciplinary artist who has earned international acclaim for her works exploring fundamental questions of existence and examining humanity’s relationship to the universe. Through her large-scale public art works that fuse cutting-edge technology with ancient symbolism, she has evoked spiritual connection and an awareness of ecosystems, and shown us a harmonious relationship between nature, humanity, and technology. Mori gained international recognition for her immersive installation, Wave UFO, which debuted in 2003. It was exhibited at venues including Kunsthaus Bregenz (Austria) in 2004 and the 51st Venice Biennale (Italy) in 2005. Her solo exhibition, Oneness, toured Europe, South America, and Asia from 2007 to 2011. When it was shown at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro in 2011 it attracted a total of 538,328 visitors, setting a record as the most visited contemporary art exhibition in the world that year. Mori has mounted solo exhibitions at major museums around the world, including the Royal Academy of Arts (2012, UK), Japan Society (2013, US), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2002, Japan), Centre Pompidou (2000, France), Brooklyn Museum (1999, US), and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1998, US).

Ken Ikeda is a musician and composer who is known for an improvisational style in which he brings about the processes of fluctuation, decay, and disappearance in electronic sound by processing FM sine waves in unique ways. Through an approach that is akin to extracting sound particles, he has attempted to rediscover the ritualistic spirituality, physicality, and primal savagery lurking in the depths of modern music. As a practice for extending the auditory experience, he attempts to rediscover music from a visual perspective by creating installations using experimental musical instruments, graphic scores, and music stands. He has established an international reputation, releasing seven solo albums through labels including Touch (UK), Room 40 (Australia), and Spekk (Japan). He has collaborated on albums with artists including David Toop, Carl Stone, Eddie Prevost, John Russell, and Roger Turner. He is also moving into cross-disciplinary areas, for example working on soundtracks for contemporary art and modern dance for projects with artists including Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tadanori Yokoo, Mariko Mori, Min Tanaka, and David Lynch.

Shinya Yamada was born in Kyoto in 1974. Standing at the intersection of Japanese and Western painting and of Buddhist thought and contemporary philosophy, he engages in artistic expression that questions the very foundations of existence. He endeavors to create complex artistic experiences that revolve around his paintings but also incorporate spatial installation pieces, tea ceremony, storytelling, sound, and physical experience. In 2020 he launched the Pulse of Silence project, which he stages at Zen temples, shrines, and cultural heritage buildings in Kyoto. He has mounted exhibitions inside and outside of Japan at venues including Ryosokuin (a Kenninji sub-temple), Kifune Shrine, Kyoto National Museum, and a church in Switzerland. In 2022 he was selected to create an official associated program for Art Collaboration Kyoto, and he has also shown works at Enryaku-ji Temple on Mount Hiei, the birthplace of Japanese Buddhism. In addition to traditional materials used in Nihonga (traditional Japanese painting) such as silk, iwa-enogu (mineral pigments), glue, and funori (seaweed adhesive), he also uses modern materials such as acrylic paint. Constructing spaces where science and nature, East and West, and the body and the environment resonate, Yamada explores prayer and existence in the contemporary world through philosophical themes such as “the pulse of silence” and “a return to the womb and the membrane of existence.”

Kyoto-based sculptor Kohei Nawa was born in 1975. He is director of Sandwich Inc. and also a professor at Kyoto University of the Arts. He completed a PhD In Fine Art Sculpture at the Kyoto City University of Arts in 2003 and then founded Sandwich Inc. in 2009. Focusing on the surface skin of his sculptures as an interface to connect to the senses, he creates works that revolve around the concept of cells. Nawa’s definition of the word “sculpture” is flexible, and he has created perceptual experiences in which the physical properties of the materials are revealed to the viewer. In recent years, he has also been involved in architectural projects such as the Kohtei art pavilion, Since 2015, he has collaborated with Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet to create performance art including Vessel, Mist, Planet [wanderer], and Mirage. In 2018, Nawa's Throne sculpture was exhibited inside the Pyramid at the Louvre Museum in France. His 25-meter-tall outdoor sculpture, Ether(Equality) was permanently installed on Île Seguin on the Seine River (France) in 2023. As of 2026, Mirage and Planet [wanderer] are being performed in cities across Europe and Asia.

Ai Makita paints with oils on canvas. Using mechanical motifs, her works aim to create organic images from inorganic elements. One of the themes that she explores is creating material, physical works based on two-dimensional digital data. In particular, she brings digital images into real space as paintings on canvas by creating compositions of photographs of artifacts made of materials like metal and plastic that she has taken herself. Lately she has begun incorporating generative AI into her work, broadening her practice beyond paintings to video, print, and installation. Makita has been selected for numerous awards, grants, and residency programs, including the Terrada Art Award, Taro Okamoto Award, POLA Art Foundation Grant for Overseas Study, Rijksakademie (Royal Netherlands Academy) finalist, ART CAKE (New York), and The Fores Project (London).

Emi Kusano was born in Tokyo in 1990. She incorporates new technologies including AI into her work, and she focuses on themes of nostalgia, pop culture, and collective memory through a practice that spans multiple disciplines. By visualizing a dialog between the past and present through a retro-futuristic aesthetic, her work offers a fresh perspective on contemporary society. Her work has been shown in over twenty countries at major institutions including M+ (Hong Kong), Saatchi Gallery (London), Grand Palais Immersif (Paris), and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and also at major international art fairs such as Frieze and Paris Photo. The street photographs taken in Harajuku that helped launch her career have been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She created a solo show in official collaboration with Ghost in the Shell, the seminal science fiction media franchise, and she has collaborated in auctions with Christie's, Gucci and UNHCR. She was named by the World Economic Forum (Davos Conference) as a Young Global Leader in 2025 and as a Cultural Leader in 2026. Since serving as a part-time lecturer at Tokyo University of the Arts, she has been spearheading the discussion on the nature of authorship and rights in the age of AI from the perspective of a working artist, for example serving on the Copyright Subcommittee of the Council for Cultural Affairs, which is under the Agency for Cultural Affairs. She is involved in wide range of creative expression, including leading the synthwave band Satellite Young, which has appeared at SXSW.

Japan-based Arisa Kumagai was born in Osaka in 1991. She confronts her complicated upbringing and her inevitable circumstances, and she sublimates the ensuing contradictions and conflicts in her paintings. While these extremely personal experiences serve as her starting point, her work is characterized by the way it expands inextricably bound emotions—life and death, love and hate, wealth and poverty—into universal themes that can be seen as a microcosm of human society. Kumagai was raised in a family that ran a high-end fashion boutique that was located behind a red-light district, and this duality became the important formative background for her work. In her Leisure Class series—which she has been working on since her student days—she depicts her grandfather wearing a luxurious silk shirt, thus visualizing the gap between appearance and reality that lies hidden in the need for ostentation. Kumagai began her signature Single Bed series after her father suffered a solitary death. In this series, she quietly reflects on complicated relationships of love and hate and social isolation, painting on canvases that are the exact dimensions of a single bed. Although she depicts a variety of motifs, the concept of memento mori always underlies her work, and she is constantly questioning individual identity and the basis for it. Against the backdrop of her study of Catholicism in recent years, she has become deeply interested in more fundamental themes such as sin and redemption, religion and beauty, and the structure of power. Sometimes her art is accompanied by her own poetry, thus deepening her expression to intersect with the viewer’s memories and arousing an inner catharsis. In Japan, Kumagai has mounted exhibitions at venues such as Gallery Koyanagi, and she has also participated in a number of group exhibitions.