Artist Biography

Visual artist

Aoi Kotsuhiroi is an artistic identity under which a collaborative practice unfolds, exploring materiality as a site of transformation, ritual, and embodied knowledge.

Working across sculpture, urushi lacquer, engraving, and photography, the work develops a body of forms rooted in slow, alchemical processes, where fire, inscription, and ancestral materials play a central role.

Trained at the Beaux-Arts, the practice has been shaped through more than twenty years of work with urushi lacquer, within an approach where time, matter, and transformation are inseparable. The work investigates notions of body, survivance, and metamorphosis, granting materials — stoneware, wood, urushi lacquer, cinnabar, animal horn — an almost organic presence.

Engraved text, traces left by fire, and pigments historically associated with both the sacred and the toxic transform each piece into a palimpsest, where biological memory, symbolic language, and non-human forces overlap. Eroticism is approached not as representation, but as a form of knowledge, grounding the work in a direct, negotiated relationship with matter understood as a co-author.

The work has been presented in numerous international institutional contexts. It notably took part in a travelling exhibition initiated by the Brooklyn Museum, presented in several museums across the United States, with an image selected for the cover of the exhibition catalogue.
It was also shown at The Museum at FIT in New York, in an exhibition curated by Valerie Steele, where the sculptural works occupied a central position and were likewise chosen for the catalogue cover.

In France, the work was presented at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris as part of a large-scale installation presented over six months, accompanied by a critical catalogue essay.
It was also invited to the MoBA Biennale and to the Trapholt Museum in Denmark, by invitation of Lidewij Edelkoort, with published texts addressing both the sculptural and photographic dimensions of the work.

The work has further been presented in London at SHOWstudio, by invitation of Nick Knight, as well as at Altaroma in Rome, through two consecutive curatorial invitations from Silvia Venturini Fendi.

Aoi Kotsuhiroi lives and works in France, where an atelier-gallery is currently being developed as a space for research, experimentation, and presentation, conceived as an extension of the artistic process.

Fire, Flesh and Inscription:

The Becoming of the Living Beyond the Human

Works by Aoi Kotsuhiroi

The work of Aoi Kotsuhiroi exists on a threshold — a liminal zone where matter, the organic, language and the sacred interpenetrate until they become inseparable.

Her pieces — whether engraved skulls, cinnabar-lacquered diptychs, or hybrid sculptural footwear — appear as transformed bodies, marked by fire, language and alchemical processes that exceed artistic intention. They stand as remnants of a ritual reenacted, evidence that an object can become an organism and that material itself can acquire breath.

In the ceramic sculptures, the human skull is already altered, as if it had continued to evolve underground, beyond or outside the living. The white surface of the stoneware, marked by carbon deposits from the wood-fired kiln, is veiled with a kind of sacred soot — a residue left by a force over which the artist acts less as controller than as privileged witness. This involuntary transformation — accepted, welcomed — is central to Kotsuhiroi’s practice: a co-creation with material powers that resist submission.

Here, the wood-fired kiln is not a technical tool but an agent, a chamber of trial, an alchemical site. Fire does not simply heat — it transmutes. It introduces ritualized chance, an unstable breath that alters the object without annihilating it. Carbon becomes a skin, an additional membrane. The firing is a rite of passage. Matter becomes a body undergoing initiation.

The presence of cinnabar, a pigment historically associated with blood, inner transmutation and the mercury of the world, intensifies this dynamic. Rooted in Chinese alchemical traditions, Mesopotamian magic and Mesoamerican funerary symbolism, cinnabar in Kotsuhiroi’s work is not decorative red — it is Living Venom, a toxic dose that reveals transformation. It charges the object with a subterranean radiation, as though the piece continued to emit an unstable energy, still burning beneath the surface.

Engraved inscriptions form the other sacred axis of the work. For Kotsuhiroi, writing is never narrative; it is incision. Text is not applied but cut into the surface, penetrating the material as a scalpel opens flesh. Each letter is a gesture, an impact upon the body of the work. Writing becomes performative, a language that wounds matter in order to produce embodied thought. Engraving makes visible a fundamental truth: text is a wound that speaks.

It is here that the philosophical dimension emerges. The artwork does not represent knowledge; it produces an experience of knowing. A knowledge that is not cerebral but sensual, almost tantric, where eroticism is neither ornamental nor metaphorical. Eroticism is the tension between forces — fire and earth, organic and post-organic, toxic pigment and geological matter. Eroticism is what makes metamorphosis possible. Georges Bataille spoke of a “burning continuity,” a form of knowledge that arises when body and world cease to be separate. Kotsuhiroi’s work inhabits precisely this zone, where it is no longer clear whether the artist opens herself to matter or matter opens itself to the artist.

In Vegetal Obscenity, this collision reaches radical intensity. Feminine shoes made of cherry wood and animal horn, lacquered with cinnabar, fuse vegetal, animal, erotic and ritual dimensions into a single hybrid form. The object appears to originate from an unknown organism — a fragment of post-human anatomy, a relic from an archaic future. Its eroticism does not solicit use or seduction but resonance: the sacred feminine, the verticality of desire, the primordial obscenity through which worlds are born.

Kotsuhiroi does not exhibit objects; she presents states of metamorphosis.

Her works resemble artifacts from a world still in formation, remnants of forgotten or future rituals. They carry the echo of a time that is not ours. Their meaning emerges in the interval where material is no longer a thing and not yet a completed form — a liminal zone in which everything remains possible, alive, dangerous.

Though profoundly spiritual, this work refuses transcendence. Instead, it anchors itself in matter — its density, its resistance, its capacity for mutation. Matter itself becomes the initiatory path, the mistress of the ritual, the site where the history of what survives the human is written.

Each piece appears as a fragment of a cosmology in formation, a vestige of a world both archaic and futuristic..
A world in which everything breathes:
earth, fire, pigment, language, form, desire, ash.
A world where creation is less an act of fabrication than an act of transmutation.
A world in which the artist becomes not a master, but a witness to what comes into being.