Birthing worlds
Born Softly, Atsuko Yamagata’s latest solo exhibition, presents a series of collages that evokes cellular and cosmic structures existing within and around us. Using handmade fiber, India ink, and paper threads, Yamagata creates biomorphic images that float and flow across pictorial space, resembling animated organisms caught between intervals of movement and stillness.
The artist discloses that this series expresses her current fascination with how “biosis or life itself” remains constantly in flux. Yamagata’s recent collages reflect how there is a sense of beauty to be found across many moments of birthing and creation: revealing her wonder at how incipient instances of becoming and being transcend more socially constructed categories, such as identity and nationality. The fragile transience of these encounters with life is also alluded to by including wilted fibers contained in found glass containers: a reminder that the stilled object or artifact attests to, but never fully captures, the vitality of the breathing, beating presence itself.
The media from which the collages are fashioned are materials whose possibilities Yamagata has consistently explored while based in Manila over the past years. In 2015, for instance, she experimented with handmade paper cutouts, natural pigments, and glue to explore the aesthetics of space; this also reflected an interest in responding to Japanese traditional materials. Since then, she has continued to produce a succession of works using paper, ink, and thread, which reflect her explorations in the themes of space, place, and identity as well as her appreciation for their aesthetic and material qualities. Likewise, her exploration of connection and movement is seen in her earlier explorations of live painting.
Currently, Yamagata is interested in wielding collage and abstraction to articulate a sense of beauty present across many quiet moments of creation. The resulting primordial forms—spanning scales from the microscopic cell to the vast cosmos beyond earth—point to the many spaces, places, and encounters from which life constantly flows forth.
About the Artist
About the Artists
Atsuko Yamagata (b. 1982, Japan) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. She has started her career as a visual artist since 2006 when she lived in Tokyo. Yamagata moved to the Philippines in 2012 and her activities have expanded more and more in the art scene in Manila. She has been participating in numerous exhibitions mainly in the Philippines and also in Japan, Indonesia, and Singapore. Yamagata is basically a self-taught artist. She received B.A. Faculty of Foreign Studies in Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, especially she majored in Indonesian language as a part of cultural study of Southeast Asia. After years, she entered Musashino Art University in Tokyo to study fine arts and took some courses for a year and dropped out. In recent years, she had many solo exhibitions and joined remarkable group exhibitions such as: three solo exhibitions in 2018, Uncontrolled Artificiality at Finale Art File, Born Softly at MO_Space, and Belongingness at West Gallery; Breathing, breeding, blowout at Artinformal and borrowed scenery at Underground Gallery are both in 2017. She had another solo exhibition in her hometown Sapporo City in 2017, made roots here at Hotel Nikko Sapporo. Also, she was selected as a participating artist in Nakanojo Biennale 2017 in Gunma Prefecture (Japan) and did residence there to make artworks for the biennale.
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
Atsuko Yamagata (b. 1982, Japan) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. She has started her career as a visual artist since 2006 when she lived in Tokyo. Yamagata moved to the Philippines in 2012 and her activities have expanded more and more in the art scene in Manila. She has been participating in numerous exhibitions mainly in the Philippines and also in Japan, Indonesia, and Singapore. Yamagata is basically a self-taught artist. She received B.A. Faculty of Foreign Studies in Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, especially she majored in Indonesian language as a part of cultural study of Southeast Asia. After years, she entered Musashino Art University in Tokyo to study fine arts and took some courses for a year and dropped out. In recent years, she had many solo exhibitions and joined remarkable group exhibitions such as: three solo exhibitions in 2018, Uncontrolled Artificiality at Finale Art File, Born Softly at MO_Space, and Belongingness at West Gallery; Breathing, breeding, blowout at Artinformal and borrowed scenery at Underground Gallery are both in 2017. She had another solo exhibition in her hometown Sapporo City in 2017, made roots here at Hotel Nikko Sapporo. Also, she was selected as a participating artist in Nakanojo Biennale 2017 in Gunma Prefecture (Japan) and did residence there to make artworks for the biennale.
Related Exhibitions
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