Qenji Yoshida (よしだ毛んじ、ヨシダケンジ)

As an Artist:

I am an artist based in Osaka, exploring what it means to be together—not through perfect understanding, but through shared misunderstandings, gentle collisions, and poetic dissonance.

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My work often begins where words fall short: between people who don't speak the same language, between humans and animals, or even between who I am and who I appear to be. These encounters don't always produce clarity. Instead, they generate interference, a kind of resonance in the gaps. I’m fascinated by how two monologues—speaking past one another—can still create something shared, something neither side expected.

 

Using conceptual art, performance, video, and text, I aim to work with the art of not understanding—turning confusion and ambiguity into sites of curiosity. Rather than trying to resolve differences, I let them co-exist, echo, and shift the way we perceive meaning and presence.

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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.