Ami Inoue was born in Miyagi Prefecture in 1991, she grew up in Marumori, Miyagi Prefecture, and currently lives in Kyoto Prefecture. She started hunting when she was still in school and has been observing different events that take place in the fields through an ethnographic point of view.
Applying these observations, she creates video works, using self-performing, self-directing, and self-documenting methodologies.
Although the subjects she chooses for her work, such as a hunter who is living in the city or her grandfather who stopped hunting after the Great East Japan Earthquake, shed light on small areas of society, they remind us of the discord of our whole human society, which co-exists with nature.
In recent years, Inoue started helping bee-keepers and has been creating video works about bees. Through being directly involved in bee-keeping practices in Kyoto Prefecture and Nose, Osaka Prefecture, she shoots videos while maintaining a close relationship with bees. Bees delicately react to environmental changes, which seem minute to humans, and change their way of living. Inoue captures subtle movements of bees with her camera, and by doing so shows the time bees live in, different from the time humans live in, and the environment that also includes humans, existing in the background. Ecology and episodes of bees told through the work somehow will evoke similarity with our urban living situation, and they will arouse the viewers’ empathy and sense of crisis and suggest them to observe satoyama (the domestic woodlands) as a whole, beyond seeing them as two separate entities as nature and man-made.

Photo by Noriko KOSHIDA

http://amiinoue.com