Royko Hori
Vita
Born in Japan and based in Berlin, Ryoko Hori is a scent composer and aromatherapist whose work is deeply rooted in Shinto beliefs. She explores the intersection between human civilizations, botanical cultures, and the earth's sense of smell as a living witness. „Scent is an essential part of my life,” she says. “It grounds me and brings me joy. I love its invisible and intangible nature. Yet scents have such a profound influence on us, shaping our emotions, our behavior, and even our thoughts.” Over the past twenty years, she has developed her career from therapist to olfactory artist, formulating different stories and contexts and translating them into the art of scent. Since 2015, she has been running the RYOKO senses salon in Berlin Neukölln, a multidisciplinary space and place for sensory journeys of discovery through olfactory creations. She plans to expand to Kyoto in 2026.
Kōgei (香藝) Where Scent Tells Its Origin
Installation, 2024 (currently exhibited in the museum)
Ryoko Hori was Artist-in-Residence at the Kranich Museum in 2024. She works with olfactory art, an art form that uses smells and scents as an artistic medium to convey emotions, memories, and concepts and to appeal to the audience on a deep, sensory level. Deeply rooted in the Japanese Shinto philosophy with its respect for nature, she has been exploring the intersections between human civilizations, botanical cultures, and the memory of the earth as a living witness in her complex scent compositions and installations for many years.
For her work Kōgei (香藝) Where Scent Tells Its Origin, she planted millet, one of the oldest crops in various cultures and religions, which originated in Asia and Africa, but was also cultivated in northern Germany. The Japanese Kanji character for scent is Kō (香). It is composed of elements representing millet, “sweetness through the mouth,” and water. For Ryoko Hori, this shows that her ancestors associated “scent” with millet. In fact, millet was a staple food in Japan long before rice became dominant. The situation is similar with the Kanji character for art, Gei (藝). It is composed of the components for tree, plants, earth, and human hands, and today has the meaning of “cultivation.” For this reason, she decided to start growing millet and use it as the basis for her artistic work during her residency.
After harvesting the millet, its essence was extracted through steam distillation and then mixed with other olfactory elements. She made a bundle of dried millet, which – as is customary in Shinto – is wrapped in a paper Shimenawa and installed in the entrance area of the museum. Attached to sacred places such as shrines, Shimenawa embody the ritual separation between the sacred world of the gods (kami) and the earthly world in Shintoism. The scent she composed, which symbolizes the “origin of scent,” is released into the air by a motion-activated diffuser as soon as a visitor enters this room. Once the scent molecules have dispersed, they are broken down by environmental processes. They are then absorbed by the earth, returning to nature and leaving a lasting impression by becoming part of the earth's memory.
