qubibi, born Kazumasa Teshigawara in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, is a Japanese artist who makes generative art in which code produces abstract, colorful patternsthrough accident and elimination rather than deliberate design.,,His name plays on the Japanese words kubi (neck) and bi (beauty), reflecting his sense that his work exists in the in-between space between artist and viewer.
Teshigawara began working at fifteen in a textile processing factory in Nihonbashi after finishing junior high school, then held a series of jobs before joining a web production company as a designer.,He became an independent designer in 2006, establishing his practice under the qubibi name. His design work won the D&AD Yellow Pencil, a Cannes Lions Silver Lion and other international awards. From 2014 to 2024 he also taught as a part-time lecturer at Tama Art University's Department of Integrated Design.
In 2010 Teshigawara made his first generative artwork, hello world, using an algorithm he has continued to develop since. His generative process is grounded in chance rather than intention. He starts with simple elements such as borders in Photoshop, lets the code run, and eliminates the outputs he considers unfitting rather than working toward a fixed idea. The results recalled Turing patterns from natural morphogenesis and led him to two further bodies of work that grew from the same algorithm. He named them mimizu, the Japanese word for earthworm, and wiwizn, its reverse. A third series, leftover, repurposes the scraps and rejected outputs from making mimizu.The same algorithm also generated Margaret, his first long-form generative art collection, released for Bright Moments Tokyo.
hello world was the subject of his solo exhibition at the Museum of Digital Art in Zurich in 2017-18.,After the designer Yugo Nakamura encouraged him to try NFTs, Teshigawara minted his first work on Hic et Nunc.In 2023 his work was also shown in the Berlin group exhibition “Techno Terrain: Nature in the Age of the Metaverse”, alongside pioneering artist Hans Dehlinger.He later showed wiwizn in a solo presentation at Cromwell Place in London in 2023.His 2024 series ERRR, released through Fakewhale, extended mimizu by treating digital glitches as deliberate elements rather than mistakes.He held the solo exhibition “Last Tango” at Nguyen Wahed in New York from December 2024 to January 2025.He has since held two further solo exhibitions of hello world, at Galerie Met in Berlin in 2025and at Tama Art University in Tokyo in 2026.In 2026 he began a new series, Through Tubes, We Now Are, made with a drawing tool he built himself.
