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Ryoko Goto’s work explores how bodies, objects, sensations, and memories are shaped by what surrounds them: distance, atmosphere, material resistance, and
traces of lived experience. Through Intuitive Abstraction, she translates these relationships into layered surfaces shaped by memory, response, and an ongoing negotiation with materials
and processes, gradually distilling personal experience into more open forms. For Goto, Intuitive Abstraction is not a fixed style, but a way of allowing sensation, material, and response
to guide the work.
Born and raised in Tokyo, Goto first encountered Pollock’s work in person at eighteen, in an exhibition focused on the New York School. She could not fully
understand what had moved her then, but she felt the power of abstraction immediately: rhythm, color, movement, and the presence of something that resisted direct explanation. That encounter
opened a way of thinking about abstraction as a language for sensing relationships, atmospheres, and underlying rhythms that could not be easily stated. Later, after moving to New York, she
sensed a related rawness in the city’s streets, surfaces, and layered visual noise, which deepened her attention to the relationship between presence, environment, sensation, and
memory.
As a child, she often accepted what was offered to her, especially when others chose for her before she had time to decide for herself. This continued into
adulthood, making it difficult at times to connect with her own preferences. In New York, she was often asked, "What do you think?" That question invited her to turn inward. Slowly, what had
become blurred within her began to come into clearer focus.
As Goto continued to build her life around her artistic practice, she became more conscious of the need to draw her own boundaries. For her, boundaries were not
a way to close herself off, but a way to better protect and care for what and who mattered to her. As those boundaries became clearer, her work also began to move closer to what felt
essential.
She spent more than a decade in New York, carrying both Tokyo and New York within her. Yet place itself rarely gave Goto a stable sense of belonging. What felt
more immediate was the atmosphere formed within certain relationships: the feeling that, with particular people, she could exist more naturally. Living and working among people from many
different countries and backgrounds also changed how she understood distance, difference, and lived experience.
Since she first began making art, Goto has worked from what deeply moves her. Each work may begin from a different point: a body, an object, a moment, a
sensation, a relationship, the atmosphere surrounding a presence, or the presence itself. For Goto, the force of an experience comes first, but it is not left untransformed. She keeps a
certain distance from it, not to make it colder, but to prevent the work from becoming purely self-contained. This distance allows the initial intensity to remain present without closing the
work around a single emotion or explanation.
Material, technique, surface, and space become ways of transforming that initial intensity, drawing out its essential elements and allowing the work to open
toward something more universal. Although she tried at times to fix her style or direction, it never felt true to the work. To do so seemed to diminish the force from which the work began,
and when that force was diminished, the work itself seemed to lose strength.
Growing up as part of a television generation, Goto encountered many kinds of worlds through the same screen: news, fiction, comedy, tragedy, distant places,
and fragments of everyday life. Television placed these realities side by side, allowing different tones, distances, and forms of experience to coexist within a single frame. Looking back,
Goto sees this as part of what shaped her resistance to a single fixed style, and her openness to works that carry multiple tones, distances, and realities at once.
Goto's visual language is not fixed in advance. She actively selects and combines materials and techniques according to what each work requires. Drawing from
water-based and oil-based media, traditional Japanese techniques, and methods shaped by her practice across Tokyo and New York, she works across a wide range of approaches.
Encounters with the work of Jack Whitten and Eva Hesse clarified how Goto understood material. Their work made her consider not only what an image could
express, but why a material is chosen and how an artist comes to understand it through the act of making. At the same time, their work is visually resolved, with a strong sense of composition
and visual structure. Seeing this reaffirmed for Goto the importance of pursuing that same balance in her own work. Materials are not passive tools in her practice; she treats them as
collaborators, each carrying its own weight, resistance, history, and unpredictability.
This relationship with material is central to her process. It is not improvisation for its own sake, nor a rejection of structure. Rather, it is a way of
remaining honest to what cannot yet be fully articulated. The work develops through decisions, accidents, resistance, and response, leaving traces of negotiation between intention and what
exceeds intention on the surface.
Her practice is grounded more in philosophy than spirituality. It is not mystical. During the pandemic in New York, Goto took an online art history course
offered by a university in Kyoto. When she learned about Japanese Zen gardens, she experienced a deep and unexpected recognition, as if something essential had been quietly waiting inside her
all along. She felt the need to understand Zen as something reflected in the structure, placement, and perception of the garden.
For example, when she later saw Zen gardens in Kyoto with her own eyes, she was overwhelmed by the refinement of the garden’s design. Even without knowing its
meaning, the garden was beautiful in itself. Yet through the placement of stones in relation to the pond, trees, and surrounding garden, meaning could quietly emerge. Once she learned that
the arrangement of stones could be understood as carp rising through water, she could feel their presence vividly, even though they did not literally depict carp. For Goto, this felt close to
the very concept of abstraction she had been pursuing, and to something inherited, carried quietly within her. The realization was quietly exhilarating.
This recognition also clarified something she had carried for years without fully understanding. For many years, she assisted with an annual ceremony at a
temple connected to her father through his professional work. She had always found the place unusually comforting, without knowing why. Years later, she learned that the temple belonged to
the Sōtō school of Zen, a discovery that quietly gave shape to what she had sensed all along.
Goto senses that Zen may hold something essential to her search, though she cannot yet define what it is. It cannot be reduced to a simple explanation. For now,
she can only continue to question and explore.
Alongside this search, Goto has explored Japanese materials and traditional techniques, including methods used in Japanese painting, through workshops. More
recently, she has begun learning kirikane, a traditional gilding technique in which gold leaf is cut into fine strips and applied with precision.
A mentor once told her, “Art is a noble kind of play.” For Goto, this has come to mean a serious openness: a willingness to follow what emerges, and to let the
work become something she could not have fully planned in advance.
Her work remains open rather than resolved. Shaped by material collaboration, shifting relationships, and forms of presence that are never entirely fixed, it
carries fragments of what feels essential. Viewers encounter these fragments through their own memories, backgrounds, and ways of thinking. In this sense, the viewer becomes another
collaborator.
