Artists
Naoyo Fukuda
Selected Works
About Naoyo Fukuda（1967-）
Naoyo Fukuda has explored the relationship between language and the world through poetry and form-making, taking as her starting point a sense she held from early childhood that “the world is made of words.”
In her poetry, including palindromes, she treats words as tiny “particles,” breaking them apart, recombining them, and at times setting them in circulation. Through this, she reaches toward the unexpected “form” that exists beyond language, or the quiet realm that remains after meaning has dissolved. In her form-making, meanwhile, she works with everyday materials such as paper, thread, books, and stationery, repeating painstaking acts such as writing, sewing, erasing, and reading. The things that are folded, unraveled, shaved down, and bound depart from their original functions and, carrying memory and time within them, take on a presence in a realm distinct from the visible world. Moving back and forth between poetry and form-making, Fukuda explores the nature of the world from the threshold between words that dissolve and forms that carry their traces into another time and realm.”
Her major exhibitions include “Artist File 2010: The NACT Annual Show of Contemporary Art” (The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2010), “MOT Annual 2014: Fragments—Incomplete Beginning” (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2014), “Naoyo Fukuda: The Whereabouts of Words, Their Existence” (Urawa Art Museum, 2016), “Overlapping Circles: Five Artists Collaborate with the Collection” (Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, 2020), “Shape of Atmosphere: Invisible, Formless, and We Share” (Urawa Art Museum, 2022), “Journey and Imagination―Connecting to the Stories of Others” (Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, 2022), and “Naoyo Fukuda: At the Threshold’s Edge” (The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura Annex, Kanagawa, 2026), among others.
In her poetry, including palindromes, she treats words as tiny “particles,” breaking them apart, recombining them, and at times setting them in circulation. Through this, she reaches toward the unexpected “form” that exists beyond language, or the quiet realm that remains after meaning has dissolved. In her form-making, meanwhile, she works with everyday materials such as paper, thread, books, and stationery, repeating painstaking acts such as writing, sewing, erasing, and reading. The things that are folded, unraveled, shaved down, and bound depart from their original functions and, carrying memory and time within them, take on a presence in a realm distinct from the visible world. Moving back and forth between poetry and form-making, Fukuda explores the nature of the world from the threshold between words that dissolve and forms that carry their traces into another time and realm.”
Her major exhibitions include “Artist File 2010: The NACT Annual Show of Contemporary Art” (The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2010), “MOT Annual 2014: Fragments—Incomplete Beginning” (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2014), “Naoyo Fukuda: The Whereabouts of Words, Their Existence” (Urawa Art Museum, 2016), “Overlapping Circles: Five Artists Collaborate with the Collection” (Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, 2020), “Shape of Atmosphere: Invisible, Formless, and We Share” (Urawa Art Museum, 2022), “Journey and Imagination―Connecting to the Stories of Others” (Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, 2022), and “Naoyo Fukuda: At the Threshold’s Edge” (The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura Annex, Kanagawa, 2026), among others.