Yuki Takagi’s solo exhibition ”Quiet Mistranslation”
2025.06.21 – 2025.07.06
ARTDYNE is pleased to present Yuki Takagi’s solo exhibition Quiet Mistranslation, on view from Saturday, June 21 to Sunday, July 6, 2025.
Born in Fukushima in 1994, Takagi graduated from the Department of Painting, Oil Painting Course, Tokyo University of the Arts in 2021, and completed her Master’s degree in the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the same university in March 2024. She is currently based in Tokyo.
Takagi’s practice unfolds through a multilayered process: starting from photographs of someone else’s room, she constructs scale models using styrene board and paper clay, illuminates them with light, photographs the resulting scenes, and finally translates these images into paintings. Through these stages—photograph, model, photograph again, and then painting—she captures subtle “traces” and a sense of “disquiet” that inhabit the pictorial space. The works that emerge through such layers of mediation become like wedges gently inserted into the fissures between reality and fiction, perception and memory, unsettling the very act of “seeing.”
Beginning with a private record—photographs of another person’s room—the process undergoes a ritual stripping away of traces through model-making and re-photography, before being reconstructed as a painting. In these canvases, rather than recreating a physical space, the memory of “something that might have existed” materializes like a ghost. Takagi’s act of “mistranslation” is not merely a deviation from faithful reproduction, but a poetic means of conveying an unseen presence and the reality of absence, resonating with the viewer’s unconscious. Sensations hidden within emptiness, spaces of stillness that harbor meaning—this exhibition invites visitors to experience the quiet tremors that arise between vision and perception.
An opening reception will be held on Saturday, June 21, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM.
All are welcome to attend.
Artist Statement
In my work, I follow three main processes.
First, I create a scale model using styrene board and paper clay, based on photographs of someone else’s room. This is to construct a fictional world by removing, as much as possible, the sense of life and traces of human presence that exist in the actual room.
Second, I illuminate the model with various kinds of light and photograph it. This is to search for a human presence in what is nothing more than a cheap, uninhabitable model, and to visualize something that does not exist.
Finally, I translate that photograph into a painting.
Through these three stages, my aim is to suggest a strange, unsettling “something” that exists in a space where nothing should be. Much like the way a horror film can instill fear even when no ghost appears on screen, or the way one turns around when alone in a room after sensing a presence behind them, I want viewers to feel the presence of an invisible “something” within my works.
— Yuki Takagi
髙木優希｜Yuki Takagi 略歴
1994
Born in Fukushima Prefecture
2021
B.F.A., Oil Painting, Department of Painting, Tokyo University of the Arts
2024
M.F.A., Graduate School of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts
Currently based in Tokyo.
Solo Exhibitions
2024
Night-light, ARTDYNE, Tokyo
2023
Bright Room, ARTDYNE, Tokyo
2021
Where There Are No Ghosts, ARTDYNE, Tokyo
2020
Dwelling of That Day, MEDEL GALLERY SHU, Tokyo
Group Exhibitions
2025
VOCA 2025: The Vision of Contemporary Art – Emerging Artists of the New Flat Surface, The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo
2023
INNOCENT ROOMS, Gallery Art Unlimited, Tokyo
2022
Where Do Birds Fly Now?, Private, Tokyo
2021
3331 ART FAIR 2021, ARTDYNE, Tokyo
2020
Spring Show, ARTDYNE, Tokyo
2019
Overwritten Landscapes, MEDEL GALLERY SHU, Tokyo
Gallery Opening Commemorative Two-Person Exhibition: Kumi Oguro & Yuki Takagi, ARTDYNE, Tokyo
2018
Tokyo Independent, Exhibition Hall, Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo
Is Boiled Taro Delicious?, gallery i, Tokyo
Awards
2025
Ohara Museum of Art Prize, VOCA 2025: The Vision of Contemporary Art – Emerging Artists of the New Flat Surface