Qenji Yoshida (よしだ毛んじ、ヨシダケンジ)

As an Artist:

Qenji Yoshida is an Osaka-based artist whose practice explores what it means to be together under conditions of difference, uncertainty, and partial understanding.
Raised between cultures — growing up with Japanese parents while sharing everyday life with an American roommate — he did not develop a stable sense of belonging to a single cultural framework. Instead, an ambiguous position “in-between” became a formative condition of his identity. This early experience continues to shape his work.

 

Working across conceptual art, performance, video, and text, his practice focuses on situations in which meaning does not fully align, where communication overlaps, diverges, or remains unresolved. Yoshida approaches misunderstanding not as a failure, but as a productive condition through which new forms of relation can emerge.

His projects often arise from encounters between people who do not share a common language, between humans and animals, between the real and the fake, or between self-perception and external appearance.

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As TRA-TRAVEL:

As a co-founder of TRA-TRAVEL an artist hub in Osaka, I co-curate exhibitions, run an online art school, and coordinate international artist residencies and talks. I see it as an extension of my own practice—an experiment in how people connect, mis/communicate, and create across differences.

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As a Person:

My CV lists past “official” events. But I feel that what has actually shaped me more are the personal encounters: my teacher from fashion college, a monk who taught at my Buddhist high school, the American guys who stayed at my childhood home for 10 years, my wife, my kids, friends, ex-friends, ex-enemy, someone I met who was sitting next to me on a plane, my neighbors, and my dad who passed away in 2024.

The happy fact, at least to me, is that art is a journey. Sometimes I carefully plan it, and other times I approach it spontaneously, but in the end, I hope to arrive at a place I never imagined at the start.