BIOGRAPHY

Yukari Yamada is a contemporary artist whose concept is “Find the Sparkling Moment in Life.” Through painting, poetry, mixed media, and installation, she expresses subtle moments of wonder found in everyday life, as well as traces of memory that remain deep within the heart.

In her abstract paintings, she uses circles, lines, rectangles, arcs, organic forms, light, and water to visualize atmospheres and emotional densities that tend to lose their contours within everyday life. Rather than depicting the visible world as it is, she deconstructs it through memory and bodily sensation, then reconstructs it through lines, colors, and spaces. Through this process, the preciousness held within ordinary time and sensations that might otherwise go unnoticed quietly come to the surface.

One symbolic presence in her work is Lyly, an imagined being that resembles something between a goldfish and a koi. Lyly is not a depiction of an existing fish. It appears as a form taken by the energy that circulates within the body, by emotions before they become words, and by prayers or intentions as they leave the body. Moving through the invisible moisture contained in both the air and the human body, Lyly swims between people, between the inner and outer worlds, and between memory and the present. It is an original symbol connecting kotodama, the body, water, relationships, and hope.

Since the early stages of her career, she has developed multiple approaches in parallel, including abstract painting, poetry, mixed media works combining photography and painting, and poster art using water droplets. In the mixed media works, the surface image of a photograph is transferred onto canvas and layered with paint, creating a pictorial space where recorded past and present sensation intersect. If photography is a medium that preserves a moment in time, painting becomes an act of reintroducing time, emotion, and memory into that image. Reality becomes the starting point from which memory, feeling, and atmosphere emerge through color.

Her attention to water and light is also reflected in poster art using water droplets. Transparent yet ever present around us, water is treated as a small lens that shifts fixed ways of seeing. As each droplet receives and refracts light, another image appears within a familiar landscape. This approach invites viewers to perceive sparkles and subtle atmospheric movements hidden within everyday life.

Japanese poetry is also an essential part of her practice. The poems are not explanations that fix the meaning of abstract painting. Instead, they act as a bridge between the artwork and the viewer. By creating space between image and language, the work invites viewers to place their own memories and emotions within it. In the past, she also used lines from British poetry she admired as classification titles for groups of works, reflecting an ongoing interest in the relationship between painting and language.

In solo exhibitions and group presentations, she has also created exhibitions that combine painting and poetry with music, fragrance, plants, and spatial direction, depending on the nature of the venue and project. These experiences reflect an interest in art that can be enjoyed through all five senses, allowing viewers to encounter the work not only visually, but also through sound, scent, touch, and atmosphere.

Yamada has exhibited in Japan and abroad. In 2019, she held a large scale solo exhibition at Huacui Art Center in Shanghai, China. Her practice also extends beyond the field of painting, including sake label design, collaborations with fashion brands and companies, and art direction for music videos. In 2025, she participated in EXPO 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan, bringing the practice she had cultivated through her activities in Japan and abroad into a broader public context.

Her work transforms moments when the heart quietly moves in everyday life into light, color, water, kotodama, memory, and relationships. At the core of the practice is the hope that viewers may recover their own senses, remember important people and experiences, and become aware of the small heartbeat that still remains within them.