EX­hi­Bi­tion

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Artist and poet Natsumi Aoyagi reconstructs recorded narratives as a means of dismantling existing frameworks, opening new possibilities, and imagining alternative futures for society. Juxtaposing poems, moving images, AI-generated imagery, recorded sound, and fiction, the resulting works generate multilayered meanings shaped by a speculative imagination. This imagination becomes a tool for rethinking social relations and possible worlds, revealing the invisible structures embedded in systems that initially appear to be stable and self-evident.

“Possible Words, Possible World” focuses on Aoyagi’s multimedia installations Land Registry (2024) and Language for Our Relation: A Demonstration (2025), both of which examine histories, registries, and relations of ownership constructed through human records.

Aoyagi produced Land Registry in collaboration with sound artist Miyu Hosoi for an exhibition at the NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo. The work revisits the artificial islands of Tokyo Bay—territories without a natural history, whose existence begins instead with administrative records such as land registries. If the history of such land begins with human records, Land Registry asks whether the same logic of recording might also be used to imagine its distant past or coming future.

While Land Registry explores artificial land on a macro level, Language for Our Relation: A Demonstration operates on a more intimate scale, reimagining relations among and between humans and nonhuman entities beyond ownership and the family registry system. Based on Aoyagi’s eponymous short novel, the work proposes an imaginary “relation name” system under which such relationships are understood as fluid, temporary, and mutually formed. Incorporating moving images, two-dimensional works, and dismantled wedding zabuton cushions, the site-specific installation deconstructs conventional ideas of existence, naming, and belonging.

By bringing these works together, the exhibition links macro-territory (filled-in land) with micro-social relations (the family registry system) through the keywords “record” and “ownership.” At the same time, it reveals the capacity of poetic imagination to dismantle and reconstruct existing narratives into alternative futures, inviting viewers to reconsider how they perceive, relate to, and inhabit the world.

—Jaemin Shin