Author: Ryota Matsumoto

Ryota Matsumoto is a Japanese artist, educator, and architect known for his work at the intersection of visual art and design. He is based in Japan and the United States. Born in Tokyo, he spent his formative years in Hong Kong and Japan. He pursued undergraduate studies at the Architectural Association in London and the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art. He earned a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. As an educator, he has taught architecture, art, and interdisciplinary design as a lecturer and visiting critic across the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Artist Statement

Matsumoto’s work reflects the morphological transformations of our ever-evolving urban and ecological milieus, which could be attributed to a multitude of spatio-temporal phenomena influenced by social, economic, and cultural factors. These works are created as visual commentaries on speculative changes in notions of societies, cultures, and ecosystems in the transient nature of constantly shifting topography and geology.

The artworks explore the hybrid technique, combining both traditional (ink, acrylic, and graphite) and digital mediums (algorithmic processing, data transcoding, and image compositing through customized software).

The varying scale, juxtaposition of biomorphic forms, intertwined textures, oblique projections, and visual metamorphoses are employed as multi-layered drawing methodologies to question and investigate the ubiquitous nature of urban meta-morphology, emerging realities of post-human dystopia, and their visual representation in the context of non-Euclidean configuration. The application of these techniques allows the work to transcend the boundaries between analog and digital media as well as between two- and multi-dimensional domains.

Matsumoto’s process-oriented compositional techniques imbue the work with what we see as the very essence of our socio-cultural environments, beyond the conventional protocols of architectural and artistic formalities; they conjure up the synthetic possibilities within which the spatial and temporal variations of existing spatial semiotics emerge as the potential products of alchemical procedures. ryotamatsumotostudio@gmail.com