Yui Yaegashi

Background

Yui Yaegashi was born in 1985 in Chiba, Gansu, China.

Education

Yui Yaegashi received Bachelor of Arts at the Tokyo Zokei University in 2009. Then she earned Master of Fine Arts there in 2011.

Career

Yui Yaegashi works within self-imposed systems, establishing parameters for each painting such as a limited palette or a rule of only three layers of paint. This strategy of restraint was inspired by the Japanese writer Shinichi Hoshi’s very brief science fiction stories, which he called “short-short” stories. Yaegashi began using similar strategies when she started painting while in school. The combination of chance, accident, and concision inspired by flash fiction remains at the center of Yaegashi’s work.

Yui Yaegashi’s paintings are small, but despite their size, they own the gallery. Their humble presence fills the white walls with rectangles of muted colors. Their intricacy demands intimacy. Up close are minute topographies: Here, a ridge captures the edge of a delicate movement; there, lines weave into a texture reminiscent of upholstery fabric. In two untitled pieces, created in 2015, muted beige fields cover up the gridded interactions of blue brushstrokes, but slivers of color peek out at the margins as if to illustrate the difficulty of seeing what hides underneath the blanket of the familiar. Rooted in the domestic, the exhibition, titled “To and from Home”, offers painterly poems marked by delicate restraint.

By maintaining maximum restraint, Yaegashi displays an almost ceremonial sensitivity to the process, beginning with the construction of the surface. Building up layers of parallel and intersecting lines and fields of color, she maintains a minimal yet very personal touch. She tends to the slight accidents that occur throughout her process, and after careful consideration, sometimes allows imperfections to remain. In other instances, she will almost completely paint over a very carefully built up pattern, leaving only the slightest hint of the initial layer.

Yaegashi is devoted to precision. In each work, the sum of many formal choices accrues in a meticulous set of material mathematics. Her titles reflect some of these variables, such as "Brush No. 15 of Sekaido" or "MPCG", the latter a Japanese acronym of her green, red, yellow, and gray palette. A quasi-phenomenological inquiry, the twenty-two paintings here reveal an economy of attention that deliberately attends to what is closest and hence perhaps most easily overlooked.

Studying the home with the twin perspectives of a distant observer and intimate familiar, Yaegashi seems to say that this can be found in the space that holds her. How very odd. In a chronicle of formal particularities, her work advocates the discipline of looking closely to create small and surprisingly tender works.

Yaegashi currently lives and works in Tokyo. Her work has recently been included in The way of painting at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, and in solo exhibitions at Misako & Rosen, Tokyo, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, and Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis.

Achievements

• Yui Yaegashi is highly famous for her works "Poppy", "Color", "Midstream", and "Coral red Gekkoso, Kusakabe and Matsuda Super."

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Untitled

  • midstream

  • Untitled

  • Violet No. 2

  • untitled

  • Knife

  • POPPY

  • Untitled

  • Coral red Gekkoso, Kusakabe and Matsuda Super

  • Untitled

  • MUSSINI

  • color

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • GMPC

Views

Yui Yaegashi adheres to the artistic traditions of Minimalism. Yaegashi's process – which includes overpainting and "canceling" of ground – infuses her palette with the subtlety of a built monochrome field structured by grid lines and juxtaposing fields. The resulting compositions recall not only tropes of West Coast American abstractionists, such as John McLaughlin and Frederick Hammersley, but also connect to the practicality and chromatic intensity of twentieth-century Japanese textiles. Chocked into an economy of scale is the richness of Yaegashi’s delicately built structure. Elements distinct to the artist herself meld with the visual language of her predecessors; each painting’s presence far overshadows its size.