MOMOYO TORIMITSU

Born in Japan, Momoyo Torimitsu has lived and worked in New York since 1996, when she joined the P.S. 1 International Studio Program. Torimitsu works in a variety of forms, including sculpture, installation, video, photographs, performance, and site-specific projects.

 

Torimitsu's work is inspired by the hypocritical imagery of corporate culture and media stereotypes of cuteness and happiness, reexamined through the lenses of irony and humor. Her best-known projects are series of realistic crawling businessman robots that symbolize “corporate solders.” Torimitsu has performed with her robot on the streets of global business centers. She has also created a swarm of miniature businessmen robots who tangle with each other to represent a global business “death match”.

 

Viewers of these works realize that Torimitsu’s exaggerations expose a cultural truth, and experience tension between the desire to laugh and a feeling of unsettlement, forcing them to reevaluate their own roles in the acceptance of these social norms.

 

Recent exhibitions include: SugiPOP! Portsmouth Museum of Art, Portsmouth, NH; Utopia Now, International Biennial of Media Art, Experimenta, Melbourne; Shenzhen Biannual of Urbanism\Architecture 2009, Shenzhen, China;  Thurst Projects, New York;  National Museum of Singapore, Singapore; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo;  and ZKM, Karlsruhe.