Born in Nagasaki, Japan, 1968

For more than three decades, Takashi Kuribayashi has built his practice around a single, expansive idea: boundaries. For Kuribayashi, boundaries are never just lines between two sides. They are the invisible zones in between, the acts of crossing back and forth, and the social and political histories hidden in the lines humans draw, from national borders to the coastlines on a map. The theme took root in the early 1990s, when he arrived in a newly reunified Germany to study, first in the Free Art department at the University of Kassel and then at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He became a Meisterschüler under Prof. Irmin Kamp there in 2001.

Kuribayashi builds large-scale environments that the audience must physically pass through. In Out of the Blue  (2003), viewers climbed a stepladder and pushed their heads through a false ceiling to find water on the other side. In Inseln (2010, Mori Art Museum), a four-metre mountain of earth surfaced as a world map on a pane of acrylic. In Wolkenmeer (2012, Towada Art Center), the shape of the continents shifted as fog drifted across a sea of clouds.

Beneath all of this runs a sustained concern with the relationship between humans and nature. That concern goes back to a 1997 piece in Kassel, a concrete house planted with oak trees whose roots would slowly break it apart. It continues through his research in Fukushima after the 2011 disaster and his ongoing Genki-ro series. These reactor-shaped structures turn the symbol of nuclear power toward human health and vitality. They take varied forms, from steam baths of medicinal herbs to botanical gardens and tea kettles, each offering visitors a shared experience of restoration.

Kuribayashi has exhibited internationally at the Singapore Biennale, Palais de Tokyo, and the Setouchi Triennale. His Tanker Project, begun in 2021, imagines a ship, and by extension the earth itself, as a vessel carrying artists, people, and nature together. Its prologue, Road to documenta fifteen, led to his participation in documenta fifteen in 2022 with Cinema Caravan. The same preoccupation with energy runs through Barrels (2024), made for the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, where a tree stood among 540 oil drums on a platform visitors could climb, reframing energy in a land of oil as something that lives in people and all living things. In 2024 he held a major solo exhibition, Roots, at The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama.

Kuribayashi lives and works between Zushi, Japan, and Yogyakarta, where he has been based since the mid-2010s and remains closely engaged with the Indonesian art community. He received Japan’s Minister of Culture Award in 2023 and is a visiting professor at Musashino Art University.