JR CHUO is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. Working primarily through hand-cutting paper, his practice explores ecological fragility, interconnected systems and the relationship between natural and built environments. Drawing on coral reef structures, urban infrastructure and architectural networks, he develops a distinctive visual language in which material, negative space and time become integral to the construction of form.
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