contemporary Japanese art

In contemporary life, shaped by virtual environments where perception is gamified and attention dissolves into endless scrolling and swiping, we move through a world that feels increasingly mediated and accelerated. Yasuyo’s paintings offer something very different. Her works bypass the mediated surface of screen culture and presents an immediacy of sensation, a moment to pause, feel the present and reconnect with it. They resonate with ancient and raw energy that break through like a crack in the real reaching. The artist paints straight from the gut, channeling emotional and subconscious impulses into visual worlds filled with wonder, contemplative joy and attunement. Tension builds within each piece. Some compositions unsettling others contemplative. Her paintings glimmer with fluorescent hues, that expand traditional color palette and charged it with a bold, artificial brightness reflecting the high-impact visuals of modern media culture.Yasuyo captures what she once described as “a rhythm that holds the energy of the primitive world and the brilliance of the future”—a pulse that stretches across time and is rendered into color and line. Her aesthetic is deeply grounded in a distinct Japanese aesthetics. Sense, in her paintings, doesn’t come from a fixed message (arise from internal cognitive structures)—it grows through the interelationships between people, objects, colors, and moments. She’s inspired by traditional notions like ephemerality and poignancy of mono no aware (pathos of things), Rather than preserving them as static legacies, she anchors them in the unfolding moment, imbuing them with immediacy and renewed vitality. Alongside this, Yasuyo draws from snippets of memory and fragments of mass media—newspaper clippings, magazine spreads, film stills—residues of a culture driven by speed and saturation. She recontextualises these cods into visual reportage, capturing fleeting impressions and everyday wonders. Much like a haiku or a Nō performance, Yasuyo’s paintings do not declare - they suggest. They carry an atmospheric quality, infused with the intangible: a shimmer, a haze, a resonance of something just out of reach, hovering between emergence and disappearance. Her imagery weaves layered cultural codes with poetic sensitivity, echoing Barthes’s Mythologies while evoking the transience of Japanese verse. Her visual language aligns with the Japanese aesthetics of Yūgen mysterious profound depths that used to describe the subtle profundity of things which escape articulation, yet can be sensed through form, color and rhythm. Rhythm lies at the core of her practice. She shapes it through contrast and interruption, shifts in texture, tonal dissonance, and the interplay between artificially radiant color and soft, elusive forms. Within this dynamic field, nothing remains static. Each element pushes and pulls against the next, creating patterns of tension and relaxation, change and unity. This interplay generates a visual tempo shaped as much by motion as by conceptual pauses and perceptual stillness. Yasuyo deliberately incorporates intervals. Much like rests in music, the silence between beats makes the rhythm deeper, suspend it, making space for resonance. You can sense this presence in the details: a flick of synthetic pink, a curved line drifting off, a splash of yellow that shifts the entire mood. These small gestures don’t simply decorate the surface, they create a visual rhythm, a swing and a tempo that guides the eye and gently recalibrates perception. The result is not just visual pleasure but immersion, an invitation to linger, to look more closely, to feel more deeply. What makes Yasuyo’s work so distinctive is the way she transforms the ordinary. A tree, a headline, even the taste of a parfait becomes line, texture, or hue in her world. Rather than replicating the world, she distills and reshapes this unique encounter through her own morphizing process, where form and emotion merge. Her paintings become interpretations - visual inventions that show how something feels, not just what it is. They don’t present reified still images or linear narratives, but unfold through sensual causality, an experience accessed through the senses, immediate yet elusive, never fully contained. This is what makes her art feel so alive and contemporary.