Sacrificial conformity

I am a London-based multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, and moving image using materials including metal, silicone, clay, language, and sound. My practice explores how idealised images of women become internalised, shaping the body, memory, perception, and behaviour. Having spent many years in Tokyo, Japan, I experienced a culture where bodies are judged by appearance, women's bodies are treated as objects of consumption, and everyday sexual violence is often overlooked through silence. These values are reinforced through advertisements, magazines, urban space, social media, and daily conversations, gradually embedding themselves within both consciousness and the body. Drawing on personal experiences, memories, and silenced words, I examine how social signifiers come to feel like one's own thoughts and desires. Through my work, I make visible the invisible structures that shape our sense of self and question the assumptions we accept as natural. Mai Muraguchi is a Japanese artist based in London. Productions are carried out while crossing multiple media such as sculpture, installation, video, and performance. Completed the master's program at the Royal College of Art Contemporary Art Practice in London. Starting from my own experiences growing up in Japan, I'm exploring how social norms, gender norms, and invisible power structures hidden in everyday life are engraved on the body. They place emphasis on research and physical experience, and use materials such as metal, silicon, ceramics, sound, language, etc., to create works that visualize the traces left on the body and memory by “symbols” that are repeatedly distributed in society. Major exhibitions in recent years include Fault Lines (BuOy, Tokyo, 2026) and Bamboo Progettazione? (Tainan, 2026), Chair I (London, 2025), Daydream (London, 2025), Canal Dream Art Festival 2024 (London, 2024), etc. The work was also published in the Artists' Directory and M-A of “Aesthetica Magazine.”