Yuki SAEGUSA

Yuki SAEGUSA (b. 1987) is an artist known for her series of paintings that primarily use oil and tempera, experimenting with a variety of materials and media. SAEGUSA’s works present landscapes of an ideational world, consciously reconstructed through complex personal memories and perspectives. SAEGUSA draws inspiration from traditional Japanese landscape painting and Northern European Flemish painting. This is part of an attempt to blend both Eastern and Western painting styles. Her landscapes, based on the scenery of her hometown, Azumino City (安曇野市), evoke the composition of traditional East Asian landscape paintings by incorporating multiple viewpoints in a single frame, while also recalling the detailed depiction and mystical narrative structure of Flemish paintings.

The scenes on SAEGUSA’s canvases stem from thoughts about "a place that exists in someone's mind but nowhere in reality." Each meticulously depicted scene paradoxically reveals the uncertainties and ambiguities of personal daily experiences, subjective memories, and imagination. In the finely detailed landscapes, small animals with cartoonish forms from another world which represent projections of the artist and the audience are seen. SAEGUSA also uses cardboard and folding screens she has personally collected as supports for her paintings, which she describes as "objects that were once used and destined to be discarded". She views the wrinkles and stains on these surfaces as the "memories of the materials(素材の記憶)". By painting on them, she merges the unique memories of each material with her own thoughts and gestures, creating a unique scene that is “a place where there is no place."

Yuki SAEGUSA was born in Nagano Prefecture, Japan, in 1987. After graduating from the Oil Painting Department at Nagoya University of the Arts in 2010, she currently resides and creates her artwork in Kitanagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. She has held solo exhibitions at various institutions such as ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL (Seoul, Korea, 2024), Gallery A (Shizuoka, Japan, 2022), Yebisu Art Labo  (Aichi, Japan, 2022; 2017; 2013; 2012), as well as group exhibitions held at ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL (Seoul, Korea, 2024), Bunkamura Gallery (Tokyo, Japan, 2023), ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI (Shanghai, Korea, 2022), Ginza Tsutaya Books (Tokyo, Japan, 2021), Nagoya Denki Community Hall (Aichi, Japan, 2017) and more. Her works are held in collections by institutions such as Nagoya University of the Arts (Japan), ARARIO MUSEUM (Korea), and more.