Kota Yamaji’s Acid Universe

Motion designer, graphic designer, visual artist, and music director, Tokyo-based Kota Yamaji creates AMSR-inducing visuals and videos in bubblegum colours that instantly stand out. His music video for producer tilt-six is an example of the immersive universes he creates. 

Having graduated from Tama Art University in 2015 with a degree in graphic design, he has since gone on to collaborate with a number of brands, fashion houses, and musicians. 

Heavily influenced by the Japanese pop culture and aesthetics of his youth, from comic strips to animated films and books, Kota Yamaji’s work often takes on a surreal form. Populated with recognisable bodily forms, whose faces often have been replaced with anthropomorphised objects, his work is both familiar and destabilising.

Dream-like video worlds

Kota Yamaji describes his most challenging project to have been the music video he created in 2016 for the song ‘Anakuro Noise’ by producer tilt-six. The song is performed by virtual character Hatsune Miku, a vocaloid software voicebank taking on the appearance of a cute anime girl.

‘A girl dreamed again and again. Dreams always led her life. One day, she dreamed as always. It looks kind of like a garden there. There were a lot of flowers there. The flower bloomed. The eyeball in the flower looked at her. She met a strange human standing among flowers in her dream. That human looks like a cyborg, she didn’t know whether that was human or not,’ reads the video description.

Interspersing images of a cyborg with flowers for eyes and footage of a real woman, Kota Yamaji explains in an interview with The Floating Magazine that it’s taken him ‘a lot of time to understand the process of combining computer graphics and footage recorded on camera.’

While Kota Yamaji’s work is adapted to various specific projects, each with their own visual identity, his signature traces are often present. In another music video, for the group Innosent in Formal, his characters take on the form of clowns and musicians, circling through the night.

Anakuro Noise (2016), a music video by Kota Yamaji, a member of Sato Creative Agency, is available on his website.