Fuko Katsuda

Fuko Katsuda, born 1995 in Osaka/Japan, studies at the University of Applied Art in Vienna. Hybrid figures inhabit the paintings and drawings for exhibition in “AG18 Spotlight”. They appear feminine yet genderless, concrete yet borderless, human, but not quite. In Poetry and Science, the artist uses dark themes and nocturnal forest sceneries. Compared to her earlier work, she takes a step toward the sombre and eerie, but without losing the peaceful sensation of extraordinary connection that she calls “magic“.

Here, a body with a long worm-like torso hovers between the trees; delicate veins grow through it like roots. There, the outline of a face appears as a blue light, like a weather phenomenon, translucent and with no texture of its own. They all bleed and blur into their surroundings. A ghostly glow makes them intense yet ephemeral – as if they could pass by, flicker in and out of existence, or merge with the background at any moment.

In fact, Katsuda unsettles comfortable distinctions between background and foreground. Her placement of figures, embedded in plants and natural landscapes, resonates with ecofeminist Stacy Alaimo’s claim that “the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from »the environment«“. This “makes it difficult to pose nature as a mere background for the exploits of the human […], since »nature« is always as close as one’s own skin.”1

Fuko Katsuda’s figures observe, touch, overlap and make contact. They exist as this very mesh of bodies, apparitions, growing and decaying life, waxing and waning lights that we call environment.