Ryo Kajitani

Denoise Body Experiments No. 1#

Artist’s Statement#

Triggered by phantom pain - a manifestation of embodied trauma from past experiences of violence emerging after more than a decade - this project was almost forcibly initiated. Although I had tried to negate my own experiences, bodies, pretending they never happened, my body refused to allow it. In that sense, this work began as an exploratory trial, initiated by following the lead of my body after it surged ahead.

The keyword “edit” holds significant meaning for this work. Here, “edit” is a means to generate new order from the chaos of noise, acting upon fragmented body - itself merely a single grain of social noise - and embodied trauma. The technique of collage also serves as a technical metaphor for reconfiguring the broader structures of nature and society. For me, it is an earnest means for the aesthetic sublimation of trauma - a vital method chosen as a technology for survival.

Here, through collage, I attempt to provide a compensatory order to the fragmented body. In other words, I seek a prosthetic wholeness impossible in physical space. Within this lies a delusion close to a prayer in the digital age - an attempt to reclaim the lost (or transformed and irreversible) body.

About the Artist#

Ryo Kajitani is an art model and graphic designer in Tokyo. He specialized in oil-based woodcut printmaking at Tama Art University. In his doctoral program, he studied under art historian Kunio Motoe and cultural anthropologist Nakamura Yutaka. His research focused on implementing the ontological aesthetics method in exhibition spaces with the artistic activities therein and proposed tentative logical models based on Heidegger’s art theory. His contemporary work combines analog photography with procedural and computational methods.