Statement
Ryoko Kose is an artist and researcher whose practice-led research, Being Keepers: Line Language as Survival Methodology, asks how a life can remain present within harm that cannot be resolved, measured or proved.
At the core of her inquiry is the life force: the autonomous, pulsating energy that precedes institutional validation. Her practice is grounded in Line Language, a pre-verbal grammar drawn from Ikebana and Japanese vernacular knowledge, and in Ma, the breathable interval at the heart of being. Working with crocheted red hemp yarn, drawing, found objects, beeswax, projection and accumulated daily records, she weaves Kekkai: porous clearings where the life force can breathe, honest, unruly and alive.
Her research responds to what she calls the violence of proof, the demand that pain be translated into data and that existence be justified by being legible to institutions. Drawing on Félix Guattari’s ecosophy and Yuriko Saito’s aesthetics of care, it proposes Creative Proofing: the accumulation of fragments, gestures and somatic traces as polyphonic evidence of existence, for nuclear evacuees and for anyone whose pain or precarity is rendered invisible by the absence of an institutional category.
She is also committed to diversifying the forms that academic research can take. Learning from Indigenous scholars such as Shawn Wilson and Max Liboiron, who have shown that method must adapt to culture, not culture to method, and that the shape of writing can itself perform the argument, she is developing forms of research writing and output that feel natural to Japanese ways of knowing: shaped by Ma, by relationship and by what is left unspoken, rather than by the demand for extractable data. She approaches this as a non-Indigenous scholar, with respect for the distinct contexts from which these frameworks emerge.
Her work reimagines activism as being rather than doing: a quiet, autonomous refusal, in which surviving, making art, researching and maintaining cultural ontologies are woven from the same thread.
Biography
Ryoko Kose was born in Fukuoka, Japan, and is based in Melbourne. Her lines carry a background in Ikebana and in graphic design, including work in the studio of the book artist Katsumi Komagata in Tokyo. Following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, she relocated to Melbourne in 2014.
She completed a Master of Art — Art in Public Space at RMIT University in 2018, where she developed the series Just Keep Going, and was awarded a PhD (Art) by RMIT University in 2026 for her thesis Being Keepers: Line Language as Survival Methodology.
Her work has been presented at Yarra Sculpture Gallery, RMIT Gallery (Bruised: Art Action Ecology in Asia, ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2019), Swell Sculpture Festival, Eden Gardens, Buxton Contemporary and the Melbourne Metro Tunnel Project, and in solo and group exhibitions in Japan, France and Australia. Her work is held in the collection of Atelier Vis à Vis, Marseille, and her writing has been published in the Journal of Public Space.