Kentaro Aki
Bio-Media Art · Artistic Research

Koke nazumu

A wearable woven from living moss. Worn against the skin, it turns the ancient image of “the robe of moss” into a body that breathes, cools, resists — and refuses.

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The work in one line

I turned a dead metaphor from 13th-century Japanese poetry — koke no koromo, “the robe of moss” — into a living garment: a wearable that breathes, cools, resists, and dies, forcing co-existence to be negotiated on the skin rather than admired from a distance.

01

The frame that never broke

For a thousand years, moss in Japan was only ever something to look at — in poems, temple gardens, bonsai, terrariums. Always the viewer and the viewed, never a participant. I wanted to break that frame: not in theory, but on a body, with a living thing that could refuse.

Across all of these forms — waka poetry, temple gardens, bonsai, glass terrariums — the human holds the power to assign meaning while the moss is arranged to be looked at. The physical distance narrowed over the centuries, from distant gardens to a terrarium on a desk, but the form of the relationship never changed. Moss remained an object of contemplation.

So the test had to be material, not conceptual: could that thousand-year-old frame be broken by an actual encounter — skin against a living organism that has its own responses, its own refusals?

A moss-covered stone Jizō statue in a forest, seated as if in meditation
Moss on a stone Jizō — the inherited relationship. For a thousand years moss was something to be looked at: a static metaphor for stillness, age, and the passage of time, held at a contemplative distance.
02

Three bodies of knowledge, held together

The project began as cross-disciplinary artistic research, deliberately holding together three fields usually kept apart — and the insight that organised everything came from their intersection.

Cultural history
A metaphor traced across 1,000 years
Using a historical language corpus, I followed one phrase — koke no koromo — through Japanese poetry. It surged in the Kamakura period (15+ instances against 11 moss-poems in the entire earlier Man'yōshū), then died by the Muromachi era, surviving today only as a fossil word.
Plant biology
A material that responds
Poikilohydry — moss abandons internal water regulation and lets its form change with the humidity around it. Dried, it collapses into dormancy; re-wetted, it revives within seconds. This is what let me treat moss not as a symbol but as a living, responsive material.
Bio-media art
Life as medium, not subject
The work sits in a lineage that uses living systems as the operating principle of the artwork, not merely its subject — where the ethical border of “what is life” is examined materially, on the body, rather than only in words.

A metaphor whose meaning has drained away is not a dead end — it is an opening. If the old koke no koromo stood for spiritual separation from the world, a new one could be built to mean physical connection to it.

Holding these three fields together mattered because none alone could carry the question. The cultural history told me what the metaphor once meant; the biology told me what the living material could actually do; the art lineage told me how a living system can become the working principle of a piece rather than its decoration. The design brief emerged only where the three overlapped.

The medieval poets never wore moss. They wore the idea of moss. My proposition was to collapse that distance to zero — and see what relationship emerges when a human and a living organism share the same few millimetres of space.
The concept · 03
Washing gathered moss under running water to remove soil and insects
Gathered Pleurozium schreberi, washed to remove soil and insects before cultivation. The garment had to stay alive — so every stage was governed by the moss's own biology, not the maker's schedule.
04

The instructive failure

The moss vest worn during a seated test, with a dust mask
The failed “moss vest,” worn with a dust mask. Its collapse — and the respiratory rejection — defined the real problem to solve.

My first attempt — a “moss vest” — collapsed after fifteen minutes, and its spores left me needing a dust mask. A double failure, structural and physiological. But it revealed the real problem: wearing a living thing is not a strength problem, it is a relationship problem — one that includes the body's own rejection.

The vest was bound only by the moss's own rhizoids. It held its own weight while I sat still, then tore apart the moment I shifted posture — the structure couldn't follow a moving body.

Worse was the physiological response: the spore-bearing moss, worn close to the face, caused respiratory irritation severe enough that I wore a dust mask for every test thereafter. That reaction wasn't a side effect to design out — it was the first honest sign that this other organism could act on me, and resist.

01 dry wet 02 swollen twist 03 twisted dry 04 thread
Making moss thread, in four steps: two dried strands set facing opposite ways, hydrated until the leaves swell open, twisted together along the growth axis, then dried so the stems interlock into one continuous thread.

So I redesigned around the moss's own biology.

Working the stems by hand, I found a directional rule: twisted crosswise they will not join, but twisted along the growth axis they interlock. Exploiting wet/dry cycling to soften and then set the fibres, I spun living moss thread — then hand-wove it into moss cloth.

Strands of living Pleurozium schreberi moss laid out with a 5cm scale bar
Living moss thread — three strands of Pleurozium schreberi twisted along the growth axis, the only direction in which the stems interlock.
The finished woven moss cloth, roughly 60 by 190 cm, made from living moss alone, on a dark ground
The finished moss cloth — roughly 60 × 190 cm, woven from living Pleurozium schreberi alone, no backing or added fibre. Discolouration marks where the wearer's body heat later pressed against it.
05

Verified as a material, not a metaphor

I did not want the claim “this works” to rest on impression. In a university materials lab, I ran tensile tests on a precision universal testing machine, benchmarked against cotton and polyester — and reported the results plainly, including the limits.

A strand of moss thread mounted in the grips of a Shimadzu universal testing machine for tensile testing
A single strand of moss thread mounted in a Shimadzu universal testing machine — the moment the metaphor was put on the instrument and asked to hold.
¼
Moss thread reaches roughly a quarter of the strength of cotton or polyester thread per unit area. The point was never to beat them — only to survive a body in motion.
129N/mm²
Peak stress of plain weave — which outperformed twill (116 N/mm²), because the tighter interlacing distributed load better across the living, uneven fibres.
≈0
Effect of water content on thread strength — a useful, slightly counter-intuitive result: wet or dry, the thread held roughly the same.

Twist as first-order structure, weave as second. Together they gave a living organism enough integrity to be worn — the cloth held through hours of bending, twisting, and walking without unravelling.

This was never about mass-producible fabric. It was a designed result, arrived at through iteration and measurement rather than luck: a structure strong enough to let a fragile, living material survive the demands of a moving body, at least for the duration of the work.

06

Wearing it: negotiation, not harmony

I wore the moss cloth into the mountains where the moss was gathered, and sat in zazen on a rock for about an hour.

Stillness was a design decision: only by holding still could the garment's real function — transmitting the environment into the skin rather than shielding it — accumulate slowly enough to be felt. What happened was not harmony. It was negotiation, and it cut both ways.

Wearing the living moss cloth in zazen on a rock in the mountains
An hour of zazen on a rock, wearing the living cloth. Ants moved from rock to moss to bare skin without registering a border — to them, the body had become another organic outcrop.
I warmed the moss: the moss chilled me. The closer we pushed toward union, the more clearly our incompatible physiologies asserted themselves. I named this thermal conflict — where each party's preferred condition is the other's stress, and neither can have both.
熱的相克 · netsuteki sōkoku
07

What the project argues

Trying to merge with the moss, I met not resonance but refusal — the cold, the die-off, the insects. I take that refusal as the finding, not the disappointment: the discomfort is the evidence that a real crossing with another being took place.

This is the meaning folded into the title. Koke nazumu reworks the verb nazumu — to linger, to stall, to be unable to move on. Like the reluctant hour when the sky refuses to finish darkening, the human strains toward the moss and never quite arrives. The name holds that exact feeling: pressing to belong to another living thing, and not being able to.

The making itself followed Tim Ingold's idea of correspondence — the maker answering a material's own force rather than imposing a plan. I found the moss's rules and shaped my actions, even my fingertips, around them. But applied across the species line, that pursuit of resonance produced physiological refusal instead. If life is a meshwork generated through entanglement rather than through separate, self-contained individuals, the friction is not failure; it is contact.

So the project proposes a third model of co-existence, beyond contemplation and beyond management: co-existence as mutual interference — where both parties step out of safety, accept that the other can alter and damage them, and keep searching for a temporary point of balance. For the Anthropocene, that negotiated, lossy, non-harmonious entanglement may be a more honest picture of living with other species than any image of seamless harmony.

And the whole act had a shape: the moss was borrowed, not taken. Gathered living from a mountainside, spun and woven and worn — passed through the human cycle of production, use, and consumption — then carried back and returned, still alive, to the same rock it came from. The garment was never a product to be kept. It was a loan from a living system, held for a while at the closest possible distance, and given back.

The woven moss cloth laid back onto the mossy rock in the mountains where it was gathered, still alive
The return. The woven cloth — the paler moss at centre — laid back onto the same rock it was gathered from, still living, to grow on. Borrowed from the mountain, worn, and given back alive: the closing gesture of the work.
08

What this work demonstrates