Yuriko Yamaguchi

Japanese American Sculptor

April 23, 2016 August 21, 2016

Table of Contents
Yuriko Yamagushi
Biography
Themes & Techniques
Art Description
Artist Statement
Additional Resources

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Biography and Artistic Process

Yuriko Yamaguchi (born 1948) is a

Japanese-American sculptor born in
Osaka, Japan, after the Second World
War. She immigrated to the United
States in the early 1970s at twenty-three
years of age and, barely spoke English.
Yamaguchi then turned to art to express
herself, exploring her identity as a tiny
being in a vast universe.
Her mixed-media sculptures and wall
hangings are meticulous explorations
into the evocative and poetic qualities of
resin. Fragile, crystalline structures of wire and resin, her captivating forms have
also included LED lights, wood, minerals, found objects, and vinyl tubing, among
other materials. These simultaneously reference organic shapes, molecules, viscera,
synaptic structures, and networks, and are emblematic of the interconnectedness of
all human and organic systems.
Yamaguchi works with wire, cast resin and other unconventional materials to create
striking sculptural pieces that are larger than life and appear to their viewers as
miracles of construction; minuscule elements are held in place by tiny wires which
are twisted to form remarkable sculptures, transforming the spaces they occupy.
Past works have also included materials such as sculptural paper and glass. She
links elements with wood or wires and hangs her works on walls and ceilings to
represent her spiritual connections with the world around her. She uses only
delicate materials, such as thin wires, resin, or twigs in order to evoke the simplicity
of Japanese poetry. Yamaguchi's pieces illustrate the artist's extraordinarily close
and complex relationship with her materials. Because she does not work with
traditional or conventional elements, each sculpture represents a series of
adaptations and choices, during which industrial supplies like wiring and tubing are
given an entirely new function.
Her installations are compelling in that they embody a series of paradoxes: organic
and synthetic, ethereal and bodily, fabricated and evolved. She creates sculptures
that resonate uniquely in the spaces in which they are installed. Her spontaneous
responses to architectural structures introduce a tension between the built
environment and our lived experience of such spaces, emphasizing movement,
color, and the play of light, which alters as the day progresses. Yamaguchi notes
that the increasingly complex interrelationships between nature and technology and
between biology and communication are a continual source of inspiration. My
overall concept is always that my work is like a vessel that people can fit in,
Yamaguchi has said.
She attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1975 with a BA.
Then she went on to undertake directed study at Princeton University, and
completed a Master of Fine Arts at University of Maryland, College Park in 1979
(Yamaguchi, Rope as the Symbol Expressing the Integration of Physical Existence
and Metaphysical Being, MFA thesis, University of Maryland, 1979). She is currently
a professor at George Washington University.

Works by Yuriko are found in a number of museum collections including: Hirshhorn

Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Philip
Morris Art Collection, New York, N.Y. National Museum of Women in the Arts,
Washington, D.C. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA National Museum
of American Art, Washington, DC. Works have also been previously shown at the
Fowler Museum in UCLA, The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York;
The Los Angeles County Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden;
Kanagawa Museum of Modern Art in Japan; the Smithsonian American Art Museum
as well as other venues. She is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters award in 2006, the Joan Mitchell Foundation award in 2005 and many other
awards.

Sources:
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http://asiasociety.org/texas/exhibitions/yuriko-yamaguchi
https://www.artsy.net/artist/yuriko-yamaguchi
http://yurikoyamaguchiart.com/2013/03/13/short-bio/
http://www.americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artist/?id=5718
http://www.adamsongallery.com/artists/yuriko-yamaguchi
http://www.koplindelrio.com/content/yuriko-yamaguchi

Themes & Techniques

In computing, the cloud is just a metaphor. In the art of Yuriko Yamaguchi, it
becomes compellingly tangible.
The Osaka-born Yamaguchi, whos been working in the U.S. since the 1970s and
who is now based in Vienna, Va., uses steel, copper and brass wire along with small
pieces of hand-cast resin to create sprawling modular networks that suggest
communications networks with an uncanny lightness.
Yamaguchi has been toying with the intersection of digital networks and art since
the Internet go-go days of the late 1990s, when she began creating a series called
Web that, as she writes, explored the many overlapping webs woven out of the
common forces that affect the human
condition: family origin, economic
stressors, religious beliefs, nature, time,
place, and technology.
One of these early works is on display at
Adamsona shower of resin and wire that
telegraphs the promise of Yamaguchis
more recent works but which is hampered
by its overly monochromatic palette.
Yamaguchis more recent worka series
she calls Cloudrepresents an
improvement on this approach, seamlessly
blending art with biology.
One piece, Coming, features two nodes linked by a long, thin connectora virtual
axon and dendrite, those carriers of electric impulses that power the human
nervous system. Another, UR #1, is
Yuriko Yamaguchi, Bliss, 2014, hand cast
vaguely heart-shaped, lit by the warm, red
resin, stainless steel wire, LED light, unique;
glow of LED lights.
on view at Adamson Gallery.

Yamaguchis pice de rsistance, however

is titled, simply, Cloud (top and bottom). Up close, Cloud is an organic but
orderly agglomeration of cast resin and wire. Viewed from a distance, however, its
four distinct parts are harmonious, forming an utterly convincing cloud, palpable but
evanescent.
Once we get into the cloud, we become surrounded by humid air and find nothing,
Yamaguchi writes. Like the computing cloud, she sees her art as both artificial and
able to multiply endlessly.
Yamaguchis work, more than most artists, pretty much nails what she set out to do.
Through June 14 at Adamson Gallery, 1515 14th St NW, Washington, D.C.
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Sources:
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/visual-arts/2014/04/24/yurikoyamaguchis-mixed-media-clouds-at-adamson-gallery/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/galleries-kaleidoscopeaviary-wonders-interconnected-are-you-gonna-eat-that/2014/06/05/07693bea-ea8511e3-b10e-5090cf3b5958_story.html

Art Description

Metamorphosis/Web
No other sculptor can turn paper, wood, flax and wire into wall sculptures of such
intriguing ambiguity as Yuriko Yamaguchi. In the ongoing series of works titled
Metamorphosis, begun in 1991, she conjures those materials into shapes so familiar
yet so enigmatic that its almost impossible to keep from touching them, from
physically examining them to try to divine their meaningSuch evocative power
aesthetically and psychologically of her sculpture. Metamorphosis is an apt
metaphor for what has gone on in the series over the yearsBut what makes
Yamaguchis work so compelling is its audacious ambiguity, Nothing is quite what it
seems, beginning with the physical appearance of the works. With many of the
pieces, its almost impossible to know without referring to Yamaguchis written
description whether a sculpture is animal, vegetable, or mineral.
Ferdinand Protzman, The Washington Post
Yamaguchis Metamorphosis series has been
compared to haiku, and its a fitting description. The
artist set herself formal limitations similar to the
controlled syllable count of the popular Japanese
poetic formYamaguchis Metamorphosis series
began in 1991 and was planned to include 108 rows
of sculpture. The artist says her inspiration came
from the bells in a Buddhist temple that ring out 108
times at the New Year to symbolize all the human
desires and the suffering they bring. The four forms in each line are about stability
and completion, as well as the elements earth, water, air and fire. Even though the
word poetic tends to get overused as an adjective in describing artworks, here no
other fits quite so well.
Sheila Farr, Seattle Times
The principle of transformation underlies both series, linking the works notion of life
and identity as being in flux or transition. Whats new about her web sculptures is
that they literally visualize the energy fields around the objects while they enmesh
the viewer in their auras. A more empathetic communion results between observer
and observed. Further evidence of the web sculptures malleability lies in their
ability to shift shapes and to expand or contract to fit a specific site. A comparison
of the titles from the two shows suggests that the action has also evolved, from the
more general Metamorphosis to the more particular Propulsion, Leap, Arrival, and
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Convergence, as though the artist were zeroing in on the specifics of what

constitutes change.
Sarah Tanguy, Sculpture
Web #5 (2003) is a stunning work, weird and
evocative. It is 21 feet long, with the mouth 8 feet in
diameter. The black wires that shape the piece
and eerily seemed to modify the very air you
breathed as you stood beside it are linked and
twisted in a bent, jagged, three-dimensional drawing
of improvisatory vigor.
Joe Shannon, Art in America.
She examines the interrelatedness and dependence that has bound humans to
animals and to the earth since, well, forever. That connectedness gets reinforced
through the technological innovations that connect us in succeeding generations.
Our latest happens to be the Internet.She seems genuinely beguiled by the
paradoxes of human life specifically, the illusion of individual free will in a
terminally interdependent world.
Jessica Dawson, The Washington Post
Floating World
The cloud-like Floating World (2007) nods to the
ukiyo-e woodblock tradition both in its title and
through its poetic metamorphosis of strikingly nonpoetic material copper and steel wires
interwoven with resin chips, beads, and a whole
variety of obsolete computer components. Added
to these subtle variations or fragments of a
possibly meaningful system is a lyrical analogy
between computer networks and the inescapable
interconnectedness of all mattershe became
influenced by the work of Austian-American physicist Fritjof Capra, who among
other claims to fame has been instrumental in popularizing ideas like deep
ecology and complexity theory. The basic premise of this systems theorist turned
eco-philosopher, advanced in books like The Tao of Physics (1975) and more
recently The Web of Life (1997) and The Hidden Connections (2004), is the need for
reforming the anthropocentric view of the nature/art dialectic by a greater
mindfulness of the hidden connections between everything.
Aneta Georgievska-Shine, Art US
Return

Yuriko Yamaguchi has a distinct and subtly

unsettlingly way of expressing vulnerabilityA
motion detector embedded in the ceiling registers
ones presence via spasms of tinny heartbeats
emitted by small speakers. The sound confirms
were within the sheltering environment, but also
warns of intruders, instilling a sense of paranoia
that keeps us inside.
Nord Wennerstrom, ArtForum

Georgia On My Mind
Yuriko Yamaguchi created Georgia On My Mind for the Hartsfield Atlanta
International Airport. On the north side of the T-Gate concourse, 28 cast bronze
objects, arranged horizontally in four rows of seven, respond to the grid pattern of
the wall tiles and span an overall area of 10 by 27 feet. My overall concept is
always that my work is like a vessel that people can fit in, says Yamaguchi. The
vertical rows act as metaphors for the rejuvenation of the state and transformation
of the life cycle in the larger world.
Sculpture
I believe that art is not separable from science, philosophy, social, economic or
political reality. Art is something I cannot predict; rather, it happens without preknowledge. It happens with the force of energy and inevitability. I only have to carry
it onwards to bring it into being a cohesive whole.
Creative energy is in a way like rain that comes
down from the sky when the accumulated humidity
can no longer remain suspended in the air and
drops to the earth.
In such a way, my first WEB piece was born in
1999. I did not arrive at this title after a long
deliberation over a catchy name for my work;
instead, it came to me when I installed the work in
the gallery. Coincidentally, several months later, I came across a book called The
Web of Life on my basement bookshelf. In it, American physicist and systems
theorist Frit of Capra articulated the feelings that had motivated me to create such
a piece:
The basic tension is one between the parts and the whole. The emphasis on the
parts has been called mechanistic, reductionist or atomistic; the emphasis on the
whole holistic, organismic, or ecological.
Understanding ecological interdependence means understanding relationships. It
requires the shifts of perception that are characteristic of systems thinking-from
parts to the whole, from objects to relationships, from contents to patterns. A
sustainable human community is aware of the multiple relationships among its
members

These quotations became the central focus of my art making. I found my purpose in
creating works that remind people that we are all connected in many overlapping
webs woven out of the common forces that affect the human condition: family
origin, economic stressors, religious beliefs, nature, time, place, and technology.
After all, we are only human beings who were born and will die, only to be replaced
by others in the community of man.

Sources:
http://yurikoyamaguchiart.com/artists-statement/

Artist Statement
Cloud
This newest work, Cloud evolved through a
gradual progression. First, I was curious about
the word itself: cloud systems store endless
amounts of digital records and data. I also
recalled my childhood memory of the Japanese
movie called Non-chan Rides on the Cloud. I
was only in first grade when I watched this
movie and admired Non-chan, who could float
on the cloud. It depicted a dream world at that
time. Now, everybody can get on the cloud
through technological means like when in an
airplane. Once we get into the cloud, we
become surrounded by humid air and find nothing. But I can still admire clouds from
the ground, especially since clouds somehow evoke feelings of hopes and dreams
for me. At the same time, clouds are metaphors for life itself. They look so beautiful
from the ground or from far away; however, they are empty and there is nothing
once we are inside of them.
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Interconnected
I would like to create an artwork that carries my fantasy, hopes and dreams, yet
reflects my complex emotional paradoxical feeling of nothingness through my Cloud
artwork. I intentionally chose onions and potatoes as metaphorical substances to
make my work. When we peel onion skins one after another, what are left are skins
but nothing else. When we open a potato, there is nothing unlike when we open an
apple. This reminds me of life itself. In order to make my sculpture, I peeled onion
skins and sliced potatoes and dried them until they lost 90% of their moisture. What
I discovered during the process was how beautiful the resulting aged skin was. I also
was drawn towards the unexpected beautiful curvature of sliced potatoes and onion
skin that occurred by reducing the
moisture from the cells. After making a
silicon rubber mold of the dried onion
skins and sliced potatoes, I made a
range of differently pigmented resin
pieces. To me they are like individual
cells. I made modules first by
connecting four or five pieces with
stainless steel wire without the use of
sketches. It was quite like the chance
operation John Cage mentioned for his
work process. I then connect the
modules together to discover the right matches. Gradually, a substantial shape
emerged. My work tells me what to do next. I just follow. This process is similar to
the growth of an organism.
Is there any relationship between my artwork, Cloud, and the technological cloud?
Both are artificial products and both are able to multiply endlessly; once we are
determined to destroy them, they can be corrupted instantly. In todays civilized
society, we no longer can live without technology and artificial materials. We coexist with them although we are part of nature.
Why do we live like this? Why do we constantly create new products? As long as we
have the energy to move on, we are always longing for new encounters and
discoveries as we are born to be curious.
As we tend to make mistakes and meet all different kinds of difficulties, I stumble
upon unexpected problems often while I work. Making art is never easy; however,
when I witness my work reaching maturity by coming to a cohesive whole, I always
feel it is a rewarding activity and want to continue until my energy runs out.
- Yuriko Yamaguchi

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Sources:
http://www.adamsongallery.com/exhibitions/yuriko-yamaguchi-interconnectedscience-nature-and-technologies

Additional Resources:
Videos:
Sep-17, 2014: Hurricane Girls - 04 Messages Yuriko Yamaguchi [Robin]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcV_Osha5gU

Dec-03, 2012: Meet Yuriko Yamaguchi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQdcKCMW7is

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