Kai Yoda

Born in 1985 in Tokyo, Japan
Lives and works in between Paris, London, Tokyo, and Stockholm

Kai Yoda first studied environmental information at the KEIO University in Tokyo, before going on to study photography and moving images at the Royal College of Arts in London in 2011, where he met Virginie Ittah, with whom he formed the artistic duo Ittah Yoda in 2015. From then on, they exclusively presented their work under the name Ittah Yoda until 2025.

Ittah Yoda created polysensory and therapeutic storytelling to envisage the post-anthropocene world where the natural and the digital realms interweave, fuse, and co-evolve in the dawn of ‘symbiocene’. Their sculptures, paintings, and installations echoing organic forms and materials and transcending the temporal—informed by virtual reality and information technology—were developed through intercultural creative collaborations with various artisans, manifesting into interconnected vessels that embody and share ‘genetic-artistic’ information from their environment.

Since 2024, Kai Yoda has been developing a personal artistic practice outside of the Ittah Yoda duo. In Kai Yoda’s practice, visions yield their buried contents: intimacy, desire, and the animal instincts we carry without naming them. In his paintings, these elements emerge as fundamental forces that shape our memories and our subsequent navigation of both real and imagined topographies.

Landscapes populated by chimeric figures set against acidic backdrops. An accompanying practice of collaboration with AI and scent further expands the strange origins from which his works appear to take flight. With an educational background spanning environmental information, photography, and moving image, Yoda’s understanding of these visioning machines parallels that of those who recognize the auratic quality of images: their capacity to hold imperceptible energies while serving as sites of return.

Kai Yoda (born in Tokyo in 1987, lives and works between Paris, London, Tokyo, and Stockholm) studied environmental information at KEIO University in Tokyo before earning an MFA in Photography and Moving Image from the Royal College of Art in London in 2011. His work has recently been featured in solo exhibitions at Jérôme Poggi Gallery, Paris, FR; ROH, Jakarta, ID ; the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de l’Île de Vassivière, FR ; and the Daiwa Foundation, London, GB. His work is included in several prestigious collections, such as FRAC des Pays de la Loire, FR; FRAC Artothèque Nouvelle Aquitaine, FR; Château La Coste, FR; Sigg Art Foundation, CH; Misk Foundation, SA ; and the Tumurun Museum, ID, among others.