JR CHUO is a multidisciplinary artist based in London.
Working primarily through the intricate process of hand-cutting paper, his practice investigates the fragility and interdependence of natural and constructed systems. Drawing on ecological structures, urban infrastructure and metropolitan networks, his work explores the relationships between material, time and space, using the removal of material to construct complex, interconnected forms.
Selected press:
Thousands of Individual Cuts: In Conversation with JR CHUO
There is a peculiar violence to the paper cut: a single, unrepeatable incision that cannot be undone, only built upon. It is this irreversibility, repeated across thousands of individual gestures, that forms the quiet architecture of the JR CHUO’s practice: coral reefs, cities, and ecological systems rendered through accumulation, each work a slow negotiation between control and emergence.
Trained in the systems-thinking of academic research yet drawn instinctively to a medium older than any theory he might apply to it, he works at the friction point between permanence and fragility, speed and patience, the instantly consumable image and the object that only yields itself over time.
JR CHUO x Coralive
Through a collaboration with environmental NGO Coralive, JR CHUO supports coral restoration projects in the Maldives and Madagascar.
Corals planted so far: 326
'Between Order and Chaos: The Paper Cut Art of JR CHUO’
‘Through hand-cut paper, acrylic, and filtered light, CHUO constructs complex visual systems that oscillate between organic growth and urban infrastructure’
WEGO Japan feature curated by Yasumasa Yonehara
Photography by Yasumasa Yonehara
Videography by Rui Katoh