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Rina Murao (b. 1975) is a sculptor based in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. She is currently Associate Professor at Aichi University of the Arts.
 

Born in Nagoya, Japan, she spent part of her childhood in Philadelphia and in Chautauqua County, Western New York. Raised in a family of musicians, she studied piano, violin, and percussion from an early age. The rhythmic structures of music and their spatial resonance have remained an important influence on her sculptural practice.

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She studied sculpture at Alfred University (BFA, 1998) and received her MFA (2002) and DFA (2006) from Tokyo University of the Arts. During her studies at Alfred University, she developed an interest in human geography, which led her to study landscape architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (Career Discovery Program, 1997), further broadening her perspective.

 

Her work explores the relationship between humans as spatial beings—shaped by lived experience—and the surrounding vastness to which they are inherently connected.
 

The forms of her sculptures derive in part from the built environment of her upbringing in postwar Japan—uniform reinforced-concrete apartment blocks shaped by modernist ideals of efficiency and repetition. Within these standardized architectural “boxes,” she discovered intimate spaces—closets, balconies, the space beneath a piano—that became sites of refuge and imagination.

During her childhood in the United States, she also lived near Lake Erie, where the horizon of the Great Lake would appear and disappear from view. This experience of an expansive, shifting horizon left a lasting imprint on her spatial sensibility.

Having lived in both Japan and the United States, her practice reflects a quiet tension between constructed modern environments and vast natural landscapes. Her work enters into dialogue with American Minimalism and its post-minimal developments—particularly in its use of industrial materials and structural clarity—while drawing on spatial concepts rooted in traditional Japanese architecture, such as the tea house and garden, where a confined space evokes an expansive world.

Through this layered synthesis, her sculptures suggest that even the most contained structure can open onto immeasurable vastness.

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Her recent projects explore the psychological distance between human space and the horizon. In her Balcony series, she uses the balcony as a metaphor for a part of the human mind, marking the boundary between psychological and physical, or personal and extra-personal space.

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Murao has received the Nomura Art Prize and grants from foundations including the Nitto Foundation, the Nomura Foundation, the Hibi Science Foundation, and the Toyoaki Scholarship Foundation. Her works are in the collection of the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts.