Yuki SAEGUSA

Installation View, Yuki SAEGUSA, Not Even on Ship, 4F, Courtesy of the Artist and Arario Gallery. Photo by Ian YANG.

ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL presents the first solo exhibition in Korea of Yuki SAEGUSA (b. 1987, Japan), entitled Not Even on Ship, from July 10 (Wed) to August 17 (Sat), 2024. Yuki SAEGUSA 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 current exhibition at ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL, spanning the 3rd and 4th floors, features 34 works, including 30 paintings and 4 folding screens, highlighting SAEGUSA’s characteristic delicate brushwork.

Installation View, Yuki SAEGUSA, Not Even on Ship, 3F, Courtesy of the Artist and Arario Gallery. Photo by Ian YANG.

The scenes on Yuki 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, Gravity Moon, Japanese ink, pen on golden folding screen, 174 x 174 cm, 2024, ⓒYuki SAEGUSA. Courtesy of the Artist, Pilar Corrias, and Arario Gallery.

Gravity Moon (2023), painted with Japanese pigments on an old golden folding screen, explores the relationship between gravity and time. Surrounding the folding screen on the wall are 12 paintings from the series Black Hole Sun (2023-2024), symbolizing the year, month, and day, arranged as if orbiting the screen. The interplay between the time-worn folding screen and the gravitational pull of the small ‘black holes’ organically intertwines within a single space. The golden ship anchored in the center of the painting Not Even on Ship (2023), which shares the same title as the exhibition, is an icon that metaphorically represents the infinite possibilities of painting, continuing like an endless voyage. This encompasses the idea of materials reborn as supports, not confined to their given usage. With no fixed destination and no specific route to follow, SAEGUSA’s canvas becomes an endlessly explorable unknown world.

Yuki SAEGUSA, Floating in Vague Memories, Oil, tempera on canvas, 33.3 x 33.3 cm, 2024, ⓒYuki SAEGUSA. Courtesy of the Artist, Pilar Corrias, and Arario Gallery.

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, 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 collected by institutions such as Nagoya University of the Arts, and more.

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