September 3, 2024
Featured Artists for September 2024 – LOVEHO SELECTS
Check out September's featured Tokyo creatives!
Since its birth in 2018, Tokyo Love Hotels has showcased over 300 local and international artists, pop-ups, and performance acts. In collaboration with Metropolis, Tokyo Love Hotels cherry-picks 3 talents each month to be featured as LOVEHO SELECTS, showcasing artists and small businesses to readers and culture enthusiasts alike.
Tokyo Love Hotels is an art-event organization based in Tokyo, Japan, that gathers local and international talents of all ranges to share a night of art, music, experiences, and love with the community. They support artists by providing space for them to perform, promote, network, sell, and exhibit their work; free of charge and commission.
Artist: HACOIRI (Robin Rastenberger・ASUKA・DJ Rena)
LoveHo says:
One of the headlining acts at the August event of Tokyo Love Hotels; HACOIRI, a collective that seamlessly blends Koto players, DJs, and soundscaping artists. With its distinct combination of three unique identities, HACOIRI delivers an auditory experience that can be best explained as “edgy euphoria.” This innovative mix of traditional and contemporary sounds is just what Japan has been waiting for.
Biography:
DJ Rena, ASUKA and Robin Rastenberger’s collaborative project: “HACOIRI”.
Hacoiri in Japanese literally means ‘in a box’. It also implies whatever is in that box is precious and rare.
In 2017, DJ Rena made history by winning the World Finals of the biggest DJ competition of the world, the “DMC Championships”. This made him the “youngest champion in history” at age 12 – a record that still stands to this day. Since then he has gone onto produce and remix multiple projects with several singles and an EP to his name, still at the tender age of 17 (at time of writing).
Asuka is a Koto player from a long lineage of masters of the traditional Japanese instrument, who also composes, designs and performs. He is globally considered a revolutionary icon within the Koto industry receiving offers to perform all around the world, from New York to London to Paris, back to her hometown of Tokyo.
Robin Rastenberger, a Swedish-born globe-trotting fashion model, artist, soundscape composer, producer, and entrepreneur connecting Tokyo with Europe, brings his multi-cultural originality to every project he touches.
“HACOIRI” was formed by such a gathering.
Message from HACOIRI:
“There are no borders nor genres, let freedom and identity speak.“
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Artist: Martin Berteloodt
LoveHo says:
Martin Berteloodt excels at merging elegance with the bizarre, transforming and merging the abstract with the nearly tangible. Influenced by Freudian concepts, his work stirs intense, disquieting emotions while captivating with striking allure. His current collection was displayed at the Tokyo Love Hotels event in August, where he furthered his exploration of the eerie and surreal. It truly was an experience.
Biography:
Berteloodt is a French multimedia artist based in Tokyo, Japan. He is best known for his dark and surreal style, which consistently explores themes of thoughts and trauma. Moreover, his works intersect beauty and filth, grotesque and fascination, and often evoke a sense of chaos, irrationality, and anxiety. By drawing on his rich cultural experience and curiosity about human psychology, he seamlessly creates fantastical and uncomfortable otherworldly worlds through a variety of media. Ultimately, his art reflects a profound engagement with the complexities of the human mind.
Berteloodt’s latest collection marks an important milestone in his exploration of the tangible and the immaterial. It features more palpable and physical mediums following Freudian research, aiming to give substance to thought and expand it into something tangible. The interweaving of human desire and tangible expression is both disturbing and seductive, evoking raw sensations and reflection in the viewer.
Major exhibitions to date include “MORPHOSIS” (2023 CONTRAST Gallery), “BROUILLON” (2022 Entanglement Art Gallery), and “EXHALAISON” (2022 HAKT&co Gallery).
Message from Martin Berteloodt:
“All I aim to do in my work is to get the viewer to question their relationship with their subconscious. An impure thought is only impure in contrast to what you define purity as. I truly believe that a self reflection of the mind through the forced revisit of inner feelings such as trauma, lust, or mania, can bring about a better mind to body synchronicity.”
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Artist: Sera Tonin
LoveHo says:
Featured at the August Tokyo Love Hotels event, Sera Tonin reigns supreme in Tokyo’s drag scene, merging her English sophistication with the lively spirit of Shinjuku Nichome. Her experience as a premier hairdresser in London is evident in her meticulously crafted wigs, which have even appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Sera Tonin consistently offers a show as refined as her striking appearance, and we recommend you go see her live.
Biography:
Sera Tonin is an English drag artist who currently performs in tokyo, most frequently found in Eagle Tokyo and on the big stage of Opulence – japan’s greatest international drag show. Her background in hairdressing in some of London’s most prestigious salons and academies has paved her way to having the best wigs styled that she styles for herself and other queens of Shinjuku Nichome. Her works have been featured on drag race and can be recognised by their intricate styles.
Message from Sera Tonin:
“Being a drag artist that makes wigs for fellow drag artists I know how special they have to be. The right hair can make a performer feel a million bucks. I know how indestructible they have to be to endure all we go though as entertainers. I hope this glimpse into some of my work inspires those who also wish to pick up a brush and a can of hairspray.”
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