Emi Kusano (Japanese, b. 1990),is a Tokyo-based multidisciplinary artist who uses AI-generated self-portraiture, photography, video, and music to rework archetypes from Japanese pop culture — magical girls, office workers, retro idols — into speculative, retro-futurist images.,,,,She began as a street photographer documenting Harajuku fashion before moving into music and, later, generative AI.,
As lead singer of the synthwave project Satellite Young, she has described writing lyrics about AI, online dating, and planned obsolescence within a 1980s idol pop sound.In 2022 she co-founded Shinsei Galverse, an NFT collection of 8,888 anime characters, with the animator Ayaka Ohira. Its tokens topped OpenSea's 24-hour sales ranking after launch.The following year she turned to generative AI, presenting Neural Fad for Bright Moments Tokyo — AI-generated street fashion drawn from an imagined Japanese history.,For the same year's Christie's and Gucci auction “Future Frequencies”, she collaborated with Claire Silver on Shinjitai, an AI-generated work whose auction winner received a roll of fabric mimicking the digital piece.In Melancholic Magical Maiden (2024), made with the creative coder Yurika Sayo in p5.js for Art Blocks, she deconstructed the 1990s magical girl anime genre to examine how it shapes gender expectations.
Beginning in 2025, she built a series of exhibitions around AI images generated from her own likeness.,,In Office Ladies, shown at ArtVerse's Paris Photo presentation and later at Basel Social Club, AI-generated doubles of herself repeat gestures such as typing and serving tea to examine the Japanese "Office Lady" stereotype and gender norms in workplace culture.,,Her exhibition “EGO in the Shell: Ghost Interrogation” opened at Offline Gallery in New York in October 2025 as her first solo show there. Made in official collaboration with the Ghost in the Shell franchise, it used a custom AI model trained on her own face to generate childhood memories that never happened.,In 2025 the World Economic Forum named her a Young Global Leader.,In January 2026 she spoke in the Forum's "Flexing Asia's Creative Muscles" session at Davos.Her exhibition “Ornament Survival” opened at √K Contemporary in Tokyo in May 2026, presenting the Japanese debut of a body of work first shown in Art Basel Hong Kong's Zero10 sector. The work reworks idol and magical girl archetypes from 1980s and 1990s Japan into a study of the attention economy.
