【Solo Exhibition】Yasuaki Kuroda「utterance of plants」

biscuit gallery (Shinjuku, Tokyo) is pleased to present “utterance of plants,” a solo exhibition by represented artist Yasuaki Kuroda, opening June 6, 2026.

Yasuaki Kuroda is a visual artist and textile dyer-weaver who questions the way we perceive the world by dyeing silk threads with plants and weaving them by hand.
He simmers foraged plants, dyes silk threads, and weaves. Even with the same species, the slightest differences in the soil, climate, or timing of harvest produce different colors. Layered within each hue are the passage of time through which the plant has lived and the memory of the land in which it took root. Before the written word existed, textiles served as a form of language, binding human beings and the world into a single continuum. Kuroda’s practice returns to that primordial language of weaving in an attempt to re-examine the relationship between humanity and the world.

The exhibition title “utterance of plants” derives from a worldview found in the Nihon Shoki and ancient Shinto liturgies (norito), expressed in the phrase “kusaki kototou” — the idea that grasses and trees once spoke. In that primordial world, all things were said to converse with one another. Kuroda has translated those voices into approximately 200 colors extracted from dried plants. These colors are traces that emerged precisely because plants remain continuous with the world around them, and they speak eloquently of the state of the world — its environments and the human beings within them.

At the heart of the exhibition are large-scale panel works and an installation composed of approximately 200 colors dyed from plants. Arranged across the gallery floor are the thread bobbins for 130 of those colors. The plants that became dyes, the accumulation of colored threads born from them, and the woven works into which they were transformed — the stages of the artist’s process, normally confined to the studio, will be laid open within the exhibition space. We hope you will enjoy this experience.

Yasuaki Kuroda "utterance of plants"
Exhibition View photo:Ujin Matsuo

 

Yasuaki Kuroda "utterance of plants"
Exhibition View photo:Ujin Matsuo

 

 

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