EMI KUSANO: JAPANESE CONTEMPORARY ARTIST
This was part of an ongoing series of articles that released was digitally in May 2023. They were first published in the print edition of the Bright Moments Quarterly that was distributed at Bright Moments Tokyo in Tokyo, Japan.
Emi Kusano is a multi-media artist who creates works that explore themes of technology, nostalgia, and Japanese pop culture through AI photography, installation, music, and video art. Her career began as a street photographer in Harajuku, and around 2012, as the lead singer of a Synthewave trio called Satellite Young, she was singing about modern technology dressed as a fictional 80s idol. She released last April the early 90's anime picture Shinsei Galverse, which was the world’s number one OpenSea sales 24-hour ranking. She is a co-founder and creative director of Zombie Zoo, a leading NFT project from Japan, with numerous celebrity holders across the world. She is seen as the icon of the Japanese NFT community and often is invited to prime-time TV programs.
“Since I was a child, I have been very obsessed with the culture that was born from the influence of domestic mass media. In particular, I am tremendously attracted to the culture that was born in the fashion and street of the 1990s, before I was born, when television and magazines were strong. Japanese fashion was unique and unparalleled in the world. I studied high school in the US and returned home in the 2010s obsessed with taking street snaps and providing them to CNN and the BBC as stock photos. But in just six months or so, Japanese youth turned their consumption toward information, globalized their fashion, and flooded the streets with Zara and Uniqlo. I have always dressed up as 80's idols and sang about AI and other technologies, and through the medium of PFP, I have been able to reconstruct sci-fi anime with a female focus. I would like to use the latest AI technology to express the unique youth culture of Japan in a slightly exaggerated manner, as if it were a paradox that occurred in the world of science fiction.”
Emi Kusano released ‘Neural Fad’ for Bright Moments Tokyo. Neural Fad reimagines Tokyo street fashion history to examine the relationship between AI and memory. In post-war Japan, distinctive magazines and television cultivated an aspirational youth culture that gave rise to unique fashion subcultures at different train stations around Tokyo. Inspired by the rebellious spirit of each generation and their projections towards an imagined future, Kusano produces records of subcultures that never actually existed. Reimagining the rich vocabulary and history of Tokyo street fashion through AI, the collection takes the viewer across and beyond the post-war decades of Japanese fashion history — from the Moga and Mobo of the 1940s to the Japanese hippies known as the Fūten Tribe, the Karasu Tribe of the 90s and the Gyaru and Decora fashion of the late 90s and early 2000 — to present Tokyo street fashion as imagined beyond time.
Through this collaboration between AI and Japanese street fashion archives that she herself contributed to as a street photographer of Harajuku fashion, Kusano uses emerging technologies to offer a retro-futuristic intervention into the landscape of Tokyo street fashion.
