Japanese contemporary artist Yukie Ishikawa has made her mark in the Tokyo art world through her distinctive technique of abstract painting, originating from distorted commercial imagery.
Read MoreYukie Ishikawa was born in 1961 in Tokyo, Japan.
She graduated from Musashino Art University with a degree in oil painting in 1983. Since then, she has exhibited in solo exhibitions across Japan, as well as in various major surveys of Japanese contemporary art.
She lives and works near Kawagoe, Saitama Prefecture.
Yukie Ishikawa begins a painting by enlarging found images from books, magazines, advertisements and newspapers, then projects and traces them onto canvas with oil or acrylic paint.
She is inspired by commercial aesthetics but focuses on the form of images themselves, removing all promotional meaning. Ishikawa cuts out the text of the advertisements she appropriates, instead focusing on the colour planes. Through this technique, she makes these images anew, re-colouring them to obscure their origins. She then transforms them further by layering the painting with lines, grids and other new forms.
Her practice has its foundations in the 1980s, when Japan was enjoying an economic boom, fuelling a robust design and advertising culture. Her career began in the latter part of that decade, just as the Japanese New Painting movement was taking off.
She also looked to contemporaneous Western movements, such as Pop Art and even Minimalism, listing Frank Stella and Morris Louis as inspirations. The connections to these movements are evident in her manipulation of found images from popular culture, especially advertising iconography.
Her ongoing series Impermanence (2012–present), takes inspiration from the local landscape. Ishikawa reworks old, formerly completed canvases by adding new elements, colours and even textures, such as through mixing sand or other natural materials into the paint.
Akin to her use of found images taken from print sources, here too she refreshes and reinterprets, but with imagery from her own oeuvre. This technique works to create a layering effect. ANOMALY gallery director Yuko Tamamoto told Ocula that Ishikawa's 'multi-layered paintings suggest a world in which everything is in flux.'
Yukie Ishikawa's work is widely represented in prominent collections across Japan, including the Iwaki City Art Museum; Utsunomiya Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hamaya; National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka; Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Karuizawa; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art; Agency for Cultural Affairs; and the Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance Company. Her work is also represented internationally, such as in the Rachofsky Collection in Dallas.
Yukie Ishikawa was awarded the Vision of Contemporary Art (VOCA) Award by Dai-ichi Life at the Ueno Royal Art Museum in 1995 and 1999.
Yukie Ishikawa has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include: Yukie Ishikawa, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2022); Yukie Ishikawa, Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo (2020); Yukie Ishikawa, Blum & Poe, Tokyo (2018); and Kai no Rizumu, Saison Art Program Gallery, Tokyo (2001).
Group exhibitions include: MOT Collection: Garden of Light / Continuing Whispers, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2022); The Herstory of Abstraction in East Asia, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (2019); Minimal / Post Minimal – The Contemporary Japanese Art from 1970s, Utsunomiya Museum of Art, Utsunomiya (2013); Primary Field: The State of Contemporary Art – Conversation with the 7 Fields, Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama (2007); and The Power of Painting – Japanese Painting since 1980, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2005).
Yukie Ishikawa's website can be found here.
Articles on Yukie Ishikawa have been published in various publications, including Artillery Magazine, Frieze and Tokyo Weekender.
Rachel Kubrick | Ocula | 2022
