A.A. Murakami is a Tokyo and London-based artist duo formed by Alexander Groves (British, b. 1983) and Azusa Murakami (Japanese, b. 1984).Working across sculpture, film and immersive installation, they use fog, plasma and bubbles instead of screens or projections to create what they call “Ephemeral Tech” — unnatural phenomena built from real materials.,Their work explores themes of regional identity and the future of resources in an age of globalisation.,
Groves studied art and Murakami studied architecture.They met on a postgraduate product design course and began working together as Studio Swine in 2011.,Their practice grew out of an interest in materials and how humans might coexist with the natural world less destructively. That drove research trips such as collecting plastic waste at sea for their first collaborative project, Sea Chair, a chair made from marine plastic melted down aboard a boat.They established the A.A.Murakami studio in 2020.The duo's films have been recognised at Cannes.Their work has also entered the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Vitra Design Museum in Germany and M+ in Hong Kong.,,
Their 2018 sculpture Infinity Blue, an 8.5-metre ceramic and steel monument to cyanobacteria that releases scented smoke rings, is on permanent display at the Eden Project in Cornwall.,New Spring, a mist-emitting, tree-like installation commissioned by the fashion brand COS, was staged in a disused 1930s cinema in Milan in 2017.,Silent Fall, a grove of automata imagining technology as a sensory archive for lost forests, was shown at Superblue London in 2021.In 2016 A.A. Murakami collaborated with the fashion designer Iris van Herpen on a bubble dress for her Seijaku collection, its 15,000 glass bubbles hand-formed and individually bonded in place with UV light.Their exhibition “Floating World” — built around floating bubble clouds, radiating fog rings and flickering plasma tubes— was shown at M+ in Hong Kong from August 2024 to February 2025.A show of the same title, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston as the duo's first exhibition at a US museum, ran there from May to September 2025.In 2026 their work is included in “The Aural Sea”, a group exhibition in the Uzbekistan pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale.
