Ryoko Furukawa

Ryoko Furukawa was born in 1994 in Yumesaki, Hyogo Prefecture. She completed her M.F.A. at Hiroshima City University in 2022 and is currently based in Chiba Prefecture.

Her practice centers on the relationship between images and words, paintings and their titles, and the structures of language, such as naming and word order. The artist cuts and reshapes words into whimsical creative titles, transforming familiar meanings into dreamlike scenarios. She uses English vocabulary books, instruction manuals, piano textbooks, friends’ diaries, and more of those texts written by others as source material, extracting and reconstructing fragments of language to develop her paintings. Furukawa’s work is inspired by the random collage techniques of Dadaism and the narrative style of William S. Burroughs’ novels, challenging the conventional practice of titling a work after its completion and deconstructing the hierarchical relationship between the image and its title. Whether it’ s a meaningful scene paired with a humorous title or a humorous work matched with a serious title, the artist aims to explore the relationship between images and language through this sense of mismatch, like chopping up and splicing language on a cutting board and boiling it in a large pot to generate new works. In recent work, she refers to the Oulipo, which is a French-speaking group of writers and mathematicians who were experimenting with systematic ways of writing. Furukawa said that this way, she can explore more than what she can think of and paint something that she would never think of. In recent years, she has also worked with installation, patchwork quilts, video, and art books, presenting her works both in Japan and internationally. Furukawa's paintings attempt to explore a sense of uncertainty and insecurity, using bizarre and surreal visual imagery to reinterpret the meaning of words.