Ryo SHIMIZU |
CV

Born in 1977 in Kagawa Prefecture, Ryo SHIMIZU currently lives in Kanagawa Prefecture.

Ryo Shimizu is a contemporary artist interested in the origins of writing and the incantatory nature of characters that blend into everyday life, subtly affecting the human subconscious. Combining diverse forms of expression—including text, architecture, voice, video, found objects, and even changes in thermal environments—the artist creates spaces that prompt viewers to reconsider the everyday experiences we unconsciously overlook and the fundamental connections between things.

At the core of Shimizu’s practice lies a simple yet profound question: "Why did humanity come to possess writing, or rather, why did we have to?" While characters create points of contact with others, they also harbor the underlying potential to cause division. The history of writing originated with Sumerian pictograms around 3200 BCE, evolving into Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Kanji (Chinese characters), which are believed to have been heavily influenced by these early systems, also contain supernatural elements—memories of words from the distant past, existing long before the creation of writing itself.

In Japan, writing was introduced during the transition from the Jomon period—a peaceful, conflict-free era that lasted over 15,000 years—to the Yayoi period, which saw the emergence of ruling systems, social classes, and warfare. From the perspective that the advent of writing may have facilitated the formation of Kuni (cities and empires) and the exploitation of human beings, Shimizu explores humanity before the acquisition of writing, as well as the merits and demerits brought about by its invention, as central themes.

To confront these questions, Shimizu has been conducting continuous fieldwork since 2020, primarily in the Izu Peninsula and the Shikoku region, based on the hypothesis that "the act of 'seeing' a landscape releases the magical properties inherent in letters." By walking the land and observing and analyzing geological formations, place names, ruins, shrines and temples, local ecosystems, myths, folklore, and oral traditions, the thoughts gained from this process are sublimated into physical "forms" by the artist's own hands.

In the ongoing project altering letters, Shimizu temporarily disables the viewer's act of "reading" by removing strokes from characters. Through the repetition of "seeing" and "reading," the project generates a process in which the characters re-emerge as a different language. Utilizing the supernatural elements of Kanji, the work questions the ambiguity of connection and division.

The "forms" born from walking, observing, and reflecting serve as a "hypothesis" at that given moment. They continue to be presented as "artworks" that unravel the ongoing relationship between humanity and writing in the present tense.