225,000 Carat Diamond

The exhibition title is a conversion: the artist's body weight expressed in carats. The unit that measures the value of diamonds is applied to the body itself. What the gesture exposes is not a comparison but a structure—the same logic that assigns worth to a gemstone has long been applied to women's bodies, managing and quantifying them as objects of value. Placed in the same unit, the arbitrariness of the system becomes visible.

KUMAGAE Yuna begins from the observation that what is assigned extreme value and what is discarded as worthless occupy the same plane. Empty cigarette boxes, used containers, avocado seeds—objects socially designated as without value—are treated as equivalent to luxury commodities. On these supports, luxury brand logos and the glitter of jewelry appear alongside women, skulls, and crosses. The painting becomes a site where personal experience and social coding intersect, and where the body's relationship to those codes is made legible.

The phrase no pain no life recurs across KUMAGAE's work. The proximity of pain and paint—the body's experience inseparable from the act of making—is the premise from which the work proceeds. Lips, snakes, and crosses are fired as ceramic fragments, transforming painted marks into tactile images that can be worn on the body. The work extends beyond the act of looking into physical proximity.

A 15cm stiletto heel serves no practical purpose. Yet it is worn. Tiffany is less wanted than a humidifier. A girl who has worked diligently at treatments and laser sessions, dressed in a glittering outfit, may have not bathed at all. These contradictions are not failures of femininity but its actual texture—the coexistence of aspiration and indifference, decoration and pain, social performance and private life.

KUMAGAE holds these contradictions without resolving them. The work looks at femininity, adornment, the body, and the regimes of self-management not as problems to be diagnosed but as the material conditions of experience. At minimum scale, through the smallest objects, the structure of value is made to show itself.