Aki Yamamoto: Playing with Maps

Solo Show: Aki Yamamoto
Yuko Sagawa / Curator, Meguro Museum of Art,Tokyo

Aki Yamamoto has been confronting the borders emerging from the small gaps between seeing and drawing. She has earned critical acclaim through her sensitivity to color and her compositional structure based on lines and surfaces, but her interest in painting always begins with a questioning of what we see and what is seen.

Familiar views of nature or the city that we see each day; streets we pass daily; buildings lined up next to each other; silhouettes of trees; the reflections of light; the tint of a shadow —such shapes and colors should be well-known to us, yet within memory even what should be certain in actuality is not. In the space of the canvas, Yamamoto’s hands and eyes move between the visible and invisible, exploring the possibilities of expression, searching for ways to express this uncertainty using colors and shapes. At the end of the process Yamamoto creates a painting with brilliant, beautiful colors. To me, it seems as if her paintings include a presence of the invisible. In 2018, she held a workshop at a gallery I worked at, about drawing flowers using many different tools and techniques like colored pencils or watercolor paint. Looking back, I realize that the workshop’s subtitle—“the interplay between seeing and drawing”—truly captures Yamamoto’s approach to painting.

Her new series comprises artworks based on maps, with the colors added using silkscreen printing. I was honestly surprised when Yamamoto told me about her new works. She shifts the silkscreen board slightly when she adds the colors, the contours of the transparent inks blend, and the borders melt away. I learned about the title of her exhibition—“Playing with Maps”—after having thought about her new direction for a while, and I felt as if my senses were widened a little bit. I understood that Yamamoto has wandered along the borders and embarked on a new adventure. Colors overlap, overlaps become relations. I would like to invite you to come face to face with Aki Yamamoto’s new adventure. She is a painter whose artworks never fail to stimulate the imagination of their audience.

The Drawing for "Playing with Maps"