About​

 

Tomoko Tsuruta is a contemporary artist whose practice explores perception, transformation, and the instability of meaning through fluid forms and layered atmospheres. Raised between Japan, the United States, and Singapore, her approach to painting is shaped by cultural in-betweenness—where familiar structures dissolve and memory remains in flux.

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Originally trained in international relations, she later shifted to painting, drawn to its capacity to hold ambiguity without resolution. Working with pigments and mixed media on absorbent papers, she builds each composition without pre-drawn structure, working instead through intuitive washes, translucent layering, and recurring white veils. Petal-like forms, glyphs, and figurative elements, such as blossoms or goldfish—sometimes emerge, not as symbols, but as rhythmic thresholds shaped by memory, cultural resonance, or introspective reflection. Their meanings remain fluid, personally constructed rather than tied to any single tradition.

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Across her recent and earlier works, she creates environments that hold contradiction: presence and erasure, gesture and stillness, clarity and dissolution. Her process, which she calls “art of a thousand times”, is a sustained visual dialogue, with each work unfolding organically, connected to the next through rhythm, restraint, and transformation.

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Tsuruta holds a BA in Fine Art from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore (validated by Goldsmiths, University of London). Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in private and corporate collections.

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