Saeri Kiritani

Saeri Kiritani is a Japanese visual artist living and working in New York City. Her works explore the interdependent relationships and sub-contexts of meaning between 'insider' and 'outsider' groups, and the associated experiences of comfort and disturbance that arise from these. Her video installation entitled Room B-29 (2013) was exhibited at The Project Biennial of Contemporary Art (located in an atomic bomb shelter in Bosnia). In this piece, a phantom from Hiroshima is trapped in a transitory world somewhere between life and death. In Saeri's life-size self-portrait sculpture entitled 100 Pounds of Rice (2003-2010), she is literally and symbolically reconstituted out of rice. Rice is a cultural signifier of Asian identity which sometimes carries both positive and negative connotations. This sculpture illuminates the conflicted relationship immigrants have with such cultural signifiers, which are both familiar and comforting but also serve as markers of difference and components of stereotypes. The amorphous amalgamation of individual identity and cultural stereotype is further evoked by the sculptural pedestal, a mountain of rice, that the figure both triumphantly emerges out of or drowns into. This work was exhibited at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC.

She has had solo exhibitions at several museums and galleries including the City Museum (Split, Croatia), The International Center (New York City), and the Inform Gallery (Kanazawa, Japan). Her selected works have been exhibited in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC., the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, the Croatian Association of Artists Museum, the Louvre Museum in Paris and various group shows at galleries in the US, Europe and Japan.