Kairi Tokoro is a Japanese artist based in London. His practice explores materiality in space through sound, sculpture, and performance. Drawing from natural, forgotten and found objects, his work investigates subtle shifts in temporality through form, motion, and sound, inviting contemplation on the interplay between stillness and movement, presence and absence of 「間」(Ma).
His work seeks to create a space where the viewer and their surroundings merge and coexist — an intersection he has been developing through his practice, rooted in the sensibility of the Japanese aesthetic of Ma. The notion of Ma refers not simply to the space between two things, or the gap between two moments, but to an interval in which emptiness brings substance into focus. Presence and absence are considered as one, where the void is not separate from substance but an essential part of the whole. In Tokoro’s body of work, he represents the silence between sounds and the gaps between objects: it is the empty space and time that allow the objects to breathe, the sound to vibrate — an act of seeing absence not as a lack of presence, but as a quiet fullness.
His creative process involves engaging with material as if he were part of its environment, allowing it to dictate its own transformation. As he touches the material in front of him, he questions its lifetime: how has this material taken this shape? What kind of sound will this shape produce? His work always begins with a conversation with each of these materials.
Materials, in his view, are never isolated entities, but are always changing within their surrounding environment and in relationship with others. They arrive at their current form by encountering, intersecting, sometimes enduring, and sometimes accepting various external factors. Their final form is a culmination of bodily rhythms, the material’s history, and the symbiotic relationship that flourishes between them. In other words, materials are not shaped by internal forces, but by traces of their relationships with their surroundings — materials can only exist in relationship. Tokoro’s work does not deal only with individual materials, but is an act of listening closely to the time, space, people, and sounds that those materials have been involved in and interacting with — the Ma.
In bringing his practice of Ma into space, he aims to create an environment where the audience becomes an active part of the work itself, where sensing and responding occur simultaneously. Sound, for Tokoro, is not just auditory information, but a catalyst that connects space, body, and emotion; through live response to the things that surround us, sound bridges us to the external world.
In these experiences, the concept of Ma becomes more than an aesthetic — it is a method, a structure for connection. Ma is not a blank to be filled, but a shared interval: the breath between actions, the pause that gives shape to expression. In essence, Tokoro’s work does not present objects for interpretation, but situations to be entered into and experienced — a gesture of synthesis, the play in the void where relationships form, between body and sound, viewer and object, self and other.