There is an energetic aura surrounding the figures that inhabit the paintings of Japanese-French artist Kai Yoda, though it’s not an energy one would necessarily describe as uplifting. More often, these figures appear as haunting, ghostly presences, emerging through the alchemy of paint as if summoned from the abysses of hell (or from traumas buried deep within the subconscious). Having disbanded the artistic duo he created with partner Ittah Yoda, Kai Yoda embarked upon a new chapter in his recently closed exhibition at Bremond Capela in Paris, where he brought forth a highly charged symbolic world informed by family traumas, inherited memories and a series of intensified visions he accessed in a recent journey of self-discovery. Particularly influential was his recent stay in Indonesia, coinciding with an exhibition at Rho Projects. There, he reconnected with a more animistic spirituality, attuning himself to the landscape’s energies and the many species inhabiting it, and that experience found its way into the saturated atmospheres that characterize his latest body of work.
Yoda’s most recent paintings are the result of an intuitive, spontaneous exercise aimed at reconnecting with something deeper within both the soul and the earth: the resilience of natural cycles and the energies of elemental forces. He primarily works with organic pigments, gathered substances, incense, oil paint, dyes and beeswax, materials that naturally open a space between inner and outer projection. Layer upon layer accumulates until symbolic evocations of bodies and spirits emerge almost magmatically from the very matter of the paintings themselves, suggesting the possibility of endless metamorphosis into new forms.
“I think I’m still kind of realizing myself, in the process. It’s quite difficult to check distance,” he candidly told Observer during a walkthrough of the show. While many of the works initially read as lyrical abstractions emerging from the subconscious, they remain deeply grounded in nature. Most of the colors, he explains, originate from plant scans, which are then manipulated as part of his process. “I worked with A.I. scientists from Spain, but then it’s very intuitive afterward. I’m also following the nature of the material, so much so that they become something more—maybe spiritual, definitely intuitive.”
The final result, Yoda acknowledged, is far messier than the industrial, posthuman refinement audiences might associate with his previous work. His paintings now emerge from an inherited animistic sensibility that allows him to see beyond individual and categorical boundaries, embracing a broader ecology of entanglements.
When asked about animism and spirituality, Yoda explained that he realized only after leaving Japan that there are very different views of reality: the more primordial, animistic one attuned to nature, and the Western vision that separates humans from it. “When I was there, it felt very normal to me, just part of the culture. Then I moved to Europe and became aware of Christian customs, and of how different that worldview is,” he reflected. “Here, there is such a strong division between living and non-living things, between object and subject. When I studied at the RCA in London, the program was very theory-based, and I felt I had to put words and concepts around everything.”
Travel has since become central to his practice. In the past year, he has spent time in different geographies, creating works in response to local plants, animals, dew, weather, food and materials. In one recent project, he collaborated with a chef and a fashion designer on a performance involving wearable elements, rust, scent, food and bodily presence. Smell, touch, sound and taste, in his work, become triggers for associations that are felt before they are understood.
Yet as omni-geographical as the work has become, the fluid surrender to some feeling of interconnectedness that underlies it began for him in Bali. He recalls geckos and snakes inhabiting the house, daily offerings of incense and food, and rituals in which ancestors remain intimately present among the living. “When you live in Indonesia, you have animals inside your house, like the first night there was a gecko right in front of me, almost like a child, and then there are snakes living around, so the division between human, animal and nature becomes blurred.”
Even death itself is part of that interconnectedness, he added. “They worship the ancestors. They perform these rituals five times a day, with incense burning and food offerings. There is also an island where they embrace the dead. They dig up the bodies, bring them out, and take photos together. They have a whole celebration. They’re smoking cigarettes together. They do it once a year. It’s on this special island near a huge volcano. I thought it was a joke, like Photoshop, but it’s real.”
The son of a Japanese photographer and a Swedish model, he carries a family history that provides a persistent undercurrent in the works shown at Bremond Capela. His mother appears in one of the paintings, though less as a portrait than as an energetic apparition: an auratic presence dissolving into a spectral scream, recalling the emotional intensity of Munch’s iconic figure. “I could never paint in front of my mom because I grew up always feeling watched,” Yoda admitted. “My parents were very intrusive. There were no boundaries. My mother didn’t let me close the door to my room, so I was always trying to create distance. But after Indonesia, I saw a new challenge: painting her in front of her, confronting her as she confronts herself.”
In the painting, he captures not simply a likeness but an emotional and energetic burden. He painted it in a kitchen while people gathered, ate, watched and commented. The gesture became a way of returning attention to her, repairing a certain distance between them and confronting trauma and emotional containment she has carried since childhood.
Notably, Yoda is one of those artists who, despite being deeply connected to the subconscious does not shy away from openly discussing his use of artificial intelligence. More often than not, A.I. functions for him as a tool to further expand, explore and elaborate these intuitive territories. “It’s like a very dark side, but I also work with A.I. software for this dream,” he said. “I put images of the paintings I’m working on, often together with photographs I take during the day, and then the software combines the two.” A.I. is, for Yoda, another way to probe the imaginative potential of the subconscious and to follow the associative flows it suggests. “It’s like brainstorming. It’s like a conversation, maybe, because before I was working with another person. A.I. becomes like another person, maybe. It provides feedback that allows you to move to the next creative step.”
Several of these new works are intermediaries between Japanese folding screens and European altarpieces, reflecting the artist’s position between Asia and Europe, as well as between his parents’ cultural inheritances. “It brings a human presence, but also an absence,” he explained, referring to one of the garments included in the exhibition. “I always try to make a sensory experience that triggers different connections in the mind—things we do not necessarily see but can feel. I try to include scent, touch, and sound as part of the work.”
After years of working primarily with sculpture, Yoda has found in painting a stronger sense of connection, while still allowing the practice to expand into installation, performance, sensory experience and the construction of a more complete symbolic world. Suspended in the space, somewhere between a garment, a sculpture and a painting, was a leather vest he developed in collaboration with Marie-Ève Lecavalier. The materials therein establish a more physical relationship with the works, appealing to touch, smell and bodily memory while carrying their own material histories. The leather derives from existing stocks. The pigments are largely handmade from natural substances, beeswax and linseed oil. Some canvases have been reused and repainted. The wood comes from dead trees collected in Vassivière, where the artist has previously exhibited.
At the opening of the Bremond Capela show, there was an almost alchemical performance involving chef Megumi Takeyama, who activated a station filled with fermented rice, sake, grains, salt and syrup. The small bites, as well as the olfactory element offered to visitors, became an extension of the exhibition itself. Tastes and smells were intense, at times even unpleasant or unsettling in their force, oscillating between attraction and repulsion in a sort of collective ritual of reconnection with the senses and the natural cycles of all matter and ingredients. In full, the exhibition was a hymn to what we all carry within us: that primordial spirit that accompanied our first encounter with the world and that can still make us curious, voracious, passionate and alive despite the growing sense of dissociation and alienation that increasingly confines contemporary existence within shortened and often sedated horizons.
