Informed by the artist's mixed Japanese-British heritage, the work of Yuki Aruga (b. 1985) explores themes of loss, longing, and identity.
Drawing from nature and 16th-18th century still life traditions, her paintings combine the traditional and the contemporary by adopting techniques of the Old Masters to create paintings from digitally rendered collages. Her compositions often feature suspended subjects in dark, expansive, void-like spaces. Blending Western materials with Eastern philosophy and Japanese aesthetics, her works exist between abstraction and figuration, presence and absence, the real and the virtual; all acting as a metaphor for her bicultural identity.
Yuki studied Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art and Camberwell College of Arts, where she was inspired by her training as a taxidermist and florist. She completed an MA at City & Guilds, receiving The Painter-Stainers Decorative Arts Fellowship. Yuki has exhibited across Europe and East Asia, and is an Honorary Freeman and curator at The Worshipful Company of Painters & Stainers.
