About
Shoji Funakawa is an artist and researcher working across installation, performance, sound, moving image, text, environmental data, found objects, and site-specific research. His works often begin with concrete encounters with weather, wind, islands, mountains, cities, plants, drift objects, memory, and forms of local knowledge. Rather than treating nature as something to be represented, Funakawa constructs situations in which the boundaries between the artificial and the natural, the observer and the observed, and the body and its environment begin to shift.
In Funakawa’s work, weather is not simply a subject. It appears as a condition through which perception, memory, language, and bodily experience are reorganised. A momentary change in wind, a shift of light, a voice, a fragment of data, a found object, or a local story becomes an element that brings different times and places into contact within the exhibition space.
Through exhibitions, performances, and long-term field research, Funakawa explores how specific experiences can be shared without being reduced to explanation. His works ask how a place, a body, a material, or a particular moment can appear as itself while also becoming connected to wider environmental, social, and temporal conditions.
- works — installation / performance / sound / moving image / text
- field — weather / wind / island / mountain / city / drift objects
- interface — device / data / archive / desk / visitor access
- language — naming / sentence / voice / field lexicon
Shoji Funakawa is an artist and researcher born in Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan, in 1987. He is based in part in Osaka, and from January 2026 to January 2027 he is living and working in Scotland and the UK as an overseas research fellow of the Pola Art Foundation. Working across installation, performance, sound, moving image, text, environmental data, found objects, and site-specific research, he creates works that explore how perception, memory, the body, place, and weather become entangled within exhibition situations. His major presentations include the Northern Alps Art Festival, Minami Hida Art Discovery, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Kobe Art Village Center, VOU, Rīgas Performances festivāls Starptelpa, and Kunstenfestivaldesarts.
installation / performance / sound / moving image / text / environmental data / field research
- Website — http://www.sjfnkw.com
- Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/a_weather_z/
- Asahi newspaper, “Hey, _”
- Paper C, “Hey, _”
- allotment award archive
- Liverary, “吹けば風”
- Art scape, “吹けば風”
- Tokyo Art Beat, “吹けば風”