There is an energetic atmosphere that surrounds the figures that inhabit the paintings of the Japanese-French artist Kai Yodaalthough it is not an energy that one would necessarily describe as uplifting. Most often, these figures appear as ghostly presences, ghosts, emerging through the alchemy of paint as if summoned from the depths of hell (or from traumas buried deep within the subconscious). After disbanding the artistic duo he created with his partner It’s YodaKai Yoda began a new chapter in his recently closed exhibition at the Bremond Capela in Paris, where he brought a highly charged symbolic world informed by family trauma, inherited memories and a series of intensified visions that appeared to him on a recent journey of self-discovery. Particularly influential was his recent stay in Indonesia, which coincided with an exhibition in Rho projects. There, he reconnected with a more animistic spirituality, attuning to the energies of the landscape and the many species that inhabit it, and this experience found its way into the saturated atmospheres that characterize his latest work.
Yoda’s latest paintings are the result of an intuitive, spontaneous exercise aimed at reconnecting with something deeper within the soul and earth: the resilience of natural cycles and the energies of the elemental forces. He works mainly with organic pigments, aggregated substances, incense, oil paint, dyes and beeswax, materials that naturally open a space between internal and external projection. Layer upon layer is piled up until symbolic evocations of bodies and souls emerge almost igneously from the very substance of the paintings themselves, suggesting the possibility of endless metamorphosis into new forms.
“I think I’m still figuring myself out in the process. It’s quite difficult to control the distance,” he candidly told the Observer during a rundown 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 scans of plants, which are then manipulated as part of his process. “I’ve been working with AI scientists from Spain, but then it’s very intuitive. I’m also following the nature of the material, so much so that they become something more—maybe spiritual, definitely intuitive.”
The end result, Yoda admitted, is far messier than the industrial, posthuman refinement audiences might associate with his earlier work. His paintings now emerge from an inherited animist sensibility that allows him to see beyond individual and categorical boundaries, embracing a wider ecology of entanglements.
When asked about animism and spirituality, Yoda explained that he realized only after leaving Japan that there were very different views of reality: the more primitive, 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 how different this worldview is,” he reflected. “Here, there is such a strong separation 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 plants, animals, dew, weather, food and local materials. In a recent project, he collaborated with a chef and a designer on a performance that incorporates elements of wear, rust, fragrance, food and bodily presence. Smell, touch, sound and taste, in his work, trigger associations that are felt before they are understood.
Yet as omni-geographic as the work has become, the fluid surrender to a sense of interconnectedness that underlies it began for him in Bali. He recalls the gecko and snakes that inhabit the house, the daily offerings of incense and food, and the rituals in which the 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 this connection, he added. “They worship ancestors. They do these rituals five times a day, with incense burning and food offerings. There’s also an island where they embrace the dead. They dig up the bodies, take them out and take pictures together. They have a whole party. They’re smoking cigarettes together. They do it once a year. They do it once a year. It’s like a big Photoshop island, but it’s real.”
The son of a Japanese photographer and a Swedish model, he carries a family history that provides a constant undercurrent to the works on display at the Bremond Capela. His mother appears in one of the paintings, though less as a portrait than as an energetic performance: an auratic presence that dissolves into a spectral scream, recalling the emotional intensity of Munch’s iconic figure. “I could never paint in front of my mother because I grew up always feeling watched,” Yoda admitted. “My parents were very intrusive. There were no boundaries. My mother wouldn’t let me close the door to my room, so I always tried to create distance. But after Indonesia, I saw a new challenge: to paint her in front of her, to face her as she faces herself.”
In painting, he captures not just a likeness, but an emotional and energetic burden. He painted it in a kitchen as people gathered, ate, watched and commented. The gesture became a way to bring attention back to her, to repair some distance between them, and to confront the trauma and emotional control she has held since childhood.
In particular, 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, AI works for him as a tool to expand, explore and further refine these intuitive territories. “It’s like a very dark side, but I also work with AI software for this dream,” he said. “I put in images of the paintings I’m working on, often alongside photographs I take during the day, and then the software combines the two.” AI is, for Yoda, another way to probe the imaginative potential of the subconscious and follow the associative flows it suggests. “It’s like a brainstorm. It’s like a conversation, maybe, because before I was working with another person. HE becomes like another person, maybe. It provides feedback that allows you to move on to the next creative step.”
Some of these new works are intermediates between Japanese folding screens and European altarpieces, reflecting the artist’s position between Asia and Europe, as well as between the cultural heritage of his parents. “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 create a sensory experience that triggers different associations in the mind – things that we don’t necessarily see, but can feel. I try to include smell, 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, still allowing the practice to expand into installation, performance, sensory experience, and building a fuller symbolic world. Suspended in space, somewhere between a garment, a sculpture and a painting, was a leather vest that he developed in collaboration with Marie-Ève Lecavalier. The materials in it create a more physical relationship with the works, appealing to touch, smell and body memory, while carrying their own material histories. Leather is derived from existing stocks. The pigments are mainly made by hand 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. The tastes and aromas were intense, sometimes even unpleasant or disturbing in their strength, oscillating between attraction and repulsion in a kind of collective ritual of reconnecting with the senses and the natural cycles of all matter and ingredients. As a whole, 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, insatiable, passionate and alive, despite the growing sense of detachment and alienation that increasingly confines contemporary existence within shortened and often pacified horizons.
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