—The story · 物語
One circle.
One circle.
One message.
The artist, the philosophy, and why a single performance at EXPO 2025 became a movement.
The artist, the philosophy, and why a single performance at EXPO 2025 became a movement.
Vit grew up in Prague, and from an early age he made things. He was never formally trained as an artist — he was just someone who couldn't stop. Art was always there, running quietly alongside everything else he did.
He was a teenager during the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Watching an entire country come together — peacefully, with dignity — and change. That experience never left him. The idea that people, gathered in the same place, sharing the same moment, can shift something in the world.
His career took him into television and video production, eventually specialising in coverage of professional golf. The tournaments brought him to Dubai again and again, and in 2012 he made it his home. It was there, in that new city, that he began taking his art seriously for the first time. He built SquareMotionArt — and started showing up to the canvas the way he should have years earlier.
Then in March 2025 he moved to Osaka to work at EXPO 2025. Japan hit him differently to anywhere else he had lived. The richness of the culture, the depth of its philosophical traditions — wabi-sabi, ikigai, ma, ichigo ichie — spoke to something he had been carrying for years without a name for it. He felt, deep down, a simple and undeniable pull: he needed to paint again. So he did. Every single day — even through a schedule of ten to twelve hours on site for six months straight. The exhaustion was real. The painting happened anyway. When something calls you that clearly, you find the time.
The circle became his language. Across cultures, across centuries — in Zen, in Christianity, in traditions around the world — the ring has always meant the same thing: connection, unity, the bond between people. For Vit, it is not just a shape. It is the question he has been asking his whole life, and the only answer he has found worth painting.
October 2025. The floor of the Czech Pavilion in Osaka. I'm on my knees in front of two hundred strangers, a brush in one hand and a large sheet of paper on the floor in front of me. Ready for the story to be written. Twenty-five minutes. Calm. Quiet. Focused. The room is dead silent, and I can hear people's breathing. And my own heartbeat.
What none of those people know is that it took me decades to kneel down on that paper. For most of my life I painted in secret — canvases in the spare room, paint on my hands at midnight — but I did not dare to call myself an artist. I called myself other things. Businessman, TV producer, golf commentator. It was a full life, an interesting one.
And then, somewhere in the middle of the painting, something happened. I could feel the energy in the room — rising off the paper, coming back to me from the people around it. I have never felt so much passing between myself and a room full of strangers. It was intense and alive.
And it was then that I saw it — the way you suddenly see a word you've written a thousand times. The circle. The space. The hole. It had been turning up in my paintings for years. I had always known it was there. I knew it mattered — the way the space between two words matters. Because without the space, the words don't exist at all. What I understood, kneeling on that floor, was — why.
The hole is a lens, an opening, a frame. The one each of us looks at life through. It is made of everything we have lived: our experiences, our emotions, how we were raised, where we have made our home. Each hole is unique and personal. Each hole has a shape that no one else has. And yet, for all those differences, we belong together and feel the same thing — that we are part of something larger than ourselves.
That is what the performance opened up for all of us. We are each individual, but part of the whole. One circle, painted together. And then divided into small fragments. I gave a piece to everyone in the room. As a memory of the feeling. Memory of the inner peace we all experienced together. The circle quietly divided into pieces, yet proudly connected in its origin.
That was the moment. Not the moment I became an artist. It was the moment I understood what I am here to do. What I am called to do. To hold these events. To bring people together. Let them experience their calm. Their quiet. Their inner peace. That is what I found, kneeling on that floor. I did not become an artist. I became an advocate of inner peace.
Because a peaceful world starts with peaceful individuals.
"Don't focus on the painting.Vit Kodousek
Focus on how you feel."
The Japanese concept at the heart of everything. Ichigo ichie — "one time, one meeting" — holds that every encounter is unique and unrepeatable. This moment, with these people, in this room, will never happen again exactly as it is now.
The performance is built entirely around that truth. Nothing is pre-recorded. Nothing is rehearsed. The circle is painted once, in real time, before a live audience. When it is finished, the moment is over. What remains is what people carry out with them.
The deepest intention of the performance is not the painting — it is the 25 minutes themselves. A room full of people, choosing to be still together. That experience is the message.
Peace in the world starts with peaceful individuals. If a single performance can create even a few minutes of genuine inner quiet in a room of 20 or 200 people, the ripple matters. The project asks not for agreement or belief, but simply for presence — your presence, in this moment, right now.
The ring is the visual centre of everything Vit makes. Inspired by the EXPO 2025 Grand Ring in Osaka — the largest wooden structure ever built — the circle carries ideas of connection, continuity, and belonging that cross every culture and tradition.
In each performance, the circle is incomplete until the final stroke. The audience watches it grow, knowing they are witnessing something that cannot be undone, revised, or repeated. That irreversibility is part of the work.
Ichigo Ichie: Circle of Peace is a non-profit project. Performances are free to attend. Donations from those who feel moved to support the work cover travel, materials, and the logistics of keeping the project alive.
The ambition is not commercial — it is reach. Temples, schools, communities, and international stages; Vit's stated goal includes the United Nations. Anywhere a room is willing to be quiet for 25 minutes is the right venue.
EXPO 2025 Osaka. The day before it closed. One performance, inside the Czech Pavilion. One circle. One audience. A tribute to the idea that a single encounter — held fully, without distraction — is enough.
It was not meant to continue. Then the invitations arrived.
Schools. Temples. Galleries. Festivals. A hotel management team in Kyoto. Children with autism in Boston. A ship in Kobe harbour. A botanical garden in Ikeda. A newspaper club in Osaka. 72+ performances across Japan, the United States, and the UAE — in less than a year, none of them planned at the start.
Every room that was willing to be quiet for 25 minutes became the next chapter. That is still how it works. There is no schedule — only invitations, and the belief that wherever the circle is drawn, something shifts.
