YUKI ARUGA ARTIST PAGE

YUKI ARUGA

ABOUT

Informed by personal experiences and mixed Japanese-British heritage, my practice addresses notions of loss, longing and identity.

I draw inspiration from nature as well as Japanese and European still life paintings and religious iconography of the 16th-18th century. The works combine the traditional and the contemporary by adopting techniques of the Old Masters to create paintings from digitally rendered collages.

My paintings often feature dark, expansive spaces in which subjects are held unfathomably suspended, alluding to the idea of the void and the numinous. More recent sculptures in wax and clay, and installations using paper, rice and soil, are symbolic of legacy, desire and rebirth.

Materially the works are often part of a Western tradition, while conceptually they are rooted in Eastern philosophy and Japanese aesthetic principles. Almost as a metaphor for my mixed-race heritage, the works lie somewhere between; between abstraction and figuration, the real and the virtual, East and West, presence and absence.

Yuki Aruga studied fine art painting at Wimbledon School of Art and Camberwell College of Arts, graduating with a first class honours degree in 2008. She completed her Masters in Fine Art in 2020 at City & Guilds of London Art School. Fuelled by her passion for nature, draftsmanship and traditional artistic techniques, she has studied and assisted taxidermists, florists and painters whose practices and methods are rooted in tradition.

Drawing on personal experiences and her mixed Japanese-British heritage, Yuki’s works are a manifestation of her ongoing investigation into how we understand, perceive and preserve time. Featuring exquisite, meticulously observed and executed flowers and other natural subjects, they are inspired by European still life paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries - works associated with the concept of the Sublime - as well as traditional Japanese aesthetic norms.

Yuki references the brief phases of perpetual and cyclical processes present in nature to demonstrate the briefness and fragility of life. "My work is a response to my fixation with time; my attempt at stopping its incessant passing, to hold something still and immovable, preserving it in a particular moment. I aim to address these anxieties and a sense of allotted time."

Placing her subjects within a dark abyss, suspended, ungrounded and displaced, Yuki encourages viewers to engage only with the form. Negative spaces and partially erased imagery allow a sense of presence through absence, alluding to notions of the void, loss and boundlessness. She endeavours to bring a silence to her work to enable us to observe nature more closely and consider the overlooked, giving permanence to subjects that are transitory and insignificant.

Yuki has participated in numerous exhibitions and Art Fairs around the world, including the group show The Columbia Threadneedle Prize: Figurative Art Today 2016 at the Mall Galleries, London, and the solo show Only Now at the Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong, in 2014. She has also undertaken several artist residencies, including most recently the Trélex Residency in Switzerland and at Stiwdio Maelor in Corris, Wales.

SELECTED ARTWORKS

THE PEACE oil on canvas 2013 74cm x 64cm framed size £1,650

Coturnix I & II

Pax oil on linen 80cm x 100cm

CURRENT EXHIBITIONS (Click for full details)

A Sense of Place 27th November - 12th December

PAST EXHIBITIONS (Click for full details)

Open House Group Show, Lane House, Biddestone, Wiltshire October 2019 - January 2020

Subscribe to our mailing list