Solo exhibition by Emi Kusano
Ornament Survival is a solo exhibition by Emi Kusano at √K Contemporary in Tokyo, presenting the Japanese debut of a new body of work first shown in Art Basel Hong Kong’s Zero10 sector. Emi Kusano extends her long-standing interest in retro-futurist imagery and idol cultures into a series that treats self‑presentation as both intimate practice and exposed surface, shaped by the logics of the attention economy.
The exhibition unfolds around figures drawn from the visual milieu of 1980s and 1990s Japan–pop idols, office ladies, nurses, and magical heroines–images that informed how transformation and agency could be imagined while remaining bound to specific expectations of femininity. Emi Kusano re‑enters these archetypes through AI‑generated images trained on her own face and body, staging what curator Kensho Tambara describes as “a sequence of attempts,” in which familiar roles are repeatedly adjusted through shifts in styling, posture, and context.
Sculptural elements, including an enlarged toy makeup compact that echoes henshin devices from “magical girl” culture, anchor these images in a vocabulary of childhood play, dressing up, and rehearsal. Rather than resolving the tension between identification and critique, the works inhabit it, allowing identity to appear as something assembled and reassembled in dialogue with inherited images and the infrastructures that now circulate them at high speed. In this sense, Ornament Survival traces how visibility itself becomes a form of labour and a strategy for staying afloat within the continuous flow of data-capitalist culture.
