Kasumi
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Kasumi works in a broad range of media: directing and producing short and feature length experimental films, performing live shows and VJing, creating looping electronic sculptures, designing motion graphics and animated GIFs, producing immersive 360-degree virtual reality installations, and making fine art prints and wearable art through glitch and data manipulation.
Kasumi grew up in an ideal crucible for a burgeoning artist, a home with inventive, imaginative parents. Her artist mother and rocket scientist father provided her with a powerful background for experimentation in art, music, and technology that became the foundation for her work as a mature artist. “My parents helped me tackle concepts and questions from wildly different points of view. This helped me later in life to navigate difficult problems through divergent, creative,and analytical thinking,” she observes.
After studying art with esteemed American painter Bill Kohn in St. Louis and music at the Stadliche Musik Hochschule in Cologne, Germany, she traveled to Japan, where she taught Baroque music at the Tokyo College of Music, performed as a soloist throughout Japan, Europe, and the US and recorded four LP albums. While living in Japan, she began to refine her interest in writing, painting, and drawing. Her illustrated parody of life in Japan, The Way of the Urban Samurai, was published in Japanese by Kodansha, Ltd. in 1986 and in English by Charles E. Tuttle, Inc. Publishers in 1992. While simultaneously pursuing her work in painting and set design—and at the same time raising a son—she continued to publish writings on music, politics, and social issues for the Asahi Shimbun, The Japan Financial Journal, The Early Music Quarterly Tokyo, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sacramento Bee, The Plain Dealer, The McLatchy Wire Service, Remix Magazine and others.
When her career turned to filmmaking in the late 90’s, her experimental works quickly gained worldwide attention at international festivals, galleries, and museums. Rather than separate one art form from another, she made use of all of them, each informing the other. Ultimately, Kasumi created and developed a unique hybrid media art, cinematic assemblage. The work is musical in form, complexity, and phrasing; literary in its symbolism and metaphor; and artistic in its depth of concept and emotion.
After being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, she embarked on a feature-length film project, Shockwaves. The film depicts a story through stream-of-consciousness, deploying a dense array of over 25,000 short public domain film samples, rotoscoped film clips, original dance choreographies, animations, and evocative sound designs, Shockwaves evokes the intense and unsettling experience of epiphany-like memories through powerfully articulated
themes of identity, exile, abandonment, homecoming, disguise, and temptation. “Our media-saturated culture has created a kind of lexicon of symbolic sounds and images—the everyday habitual gestures that are now second nature to just about anyone living on this planet,” observes Kasumi. “I synthesize this rich vocabulary into a metaphorical language that resembles the stream of subconscious connections making up human perception.”After completing Shockwaves in 2013 Kasumi shifted into creating smaller works including “Perpetual Loops“ that were represented by The Gallery at Gray’s at Miami Art Week and the Unpainted Media Art Fair, Munich. Her film Intersection debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow, Poland and traveled to twenty-one more eminent art institutions in Europe during April and May, 2014. For over a year, her work has been broadcast on French Arts TV La Télédiversité #Numero23.
As Kasumi explains, “Art allows me to reinvent narrative as a multi-dimensional tapestry of thoughts, associations and potentials moving through time and space. Through art I am able to express the un-expressible and see, hear and feel the unknowable.” Kasumi’s exhibition and collecting history includes multiple Akron connections: a 2024 solo retrospective exhibition at Summit ArtSpace, large-scale installations through Curated Storefront in 2023 and 2024, a 2017 performance titled “The Optics of Memory Experience” in the Akron Art Museum's Bud & Susie Rogers Garden, a 2014 screening at the Nightlight Cinema, and artwork in the collection of Rick Rogers. Elsewhere in Northeast Ohio, the artist has performed 4 From this section’s section paragraph to this point, the text has been lightly adapted from Cleveland Arts Prize, or exhibited at the Cleveland Museum of Art, MoCA Cleveland, Cleveland State University, Cleveland Public Theater, Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, Transformer Station, and more.
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