山崎 雅未
Mami YAMASAKI

About

 

Biography

 

Mami Yamasaki is a Japanese painter born in Osaka and raised in Takarazuka, Hyogo. She graduated from the Department of Oil Painting at Tama Art University in 2010 and currently works between Tokyo and Kyoto.

 

Her practice centers on urban landscapes at night, exploring light not only as a physical phenomenon but also as a metaphor for memory, existence, and hope.

 

Her works are held in the public collections of the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, and the ALBERTINA Museum in Austria.

 

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Statement

 

I paint cities at night.

 

For me, painting the night is also a way of painting light. Yet the light I am interested in is not simply physical illumination. Through painting, I continue to search for whether light can embody something like hope.

 

When we look at a painting, I believe we are not only looking at the image before us. We may also be confronting our own memories and emotions. Memories of happiness or familiar places can sometimes return more vividly than they actually appeared, transformed into what might be called “memory colors.”

 

Cities are places where countless people, histories, and emotions overlap. Joy and happiness coexist with anxiety, loneliness, and loss. I am drawn to the light that emerges from within this complexity and darkness.

 

My paintings begin with real cities and places, but they are not intended to reproduce reality. Through the process of painting, these locations gradually become imaginary landscapes.

 

I hope that viewers can project their own memories onto these cities and discover a different place within each painting.

 

If I were to describe what I am searching for in these landscapes in a single phrase, it would be something like hope.

 

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Process

 

I build my paintings by applying, scraping, removing, and layering paint with tools such as squeegees and painting knives. Chance marks and unexpected traces become part of the image.

 

From a distance, the paintings appear as recognizable urban landscapes. As the viewer approaches, buildings and lights begin to dissolve into color, texture, and abstract forms.

 

Toward the final stages of a painting, I often destroy or erase parts of what I have already painted and reconstruct them again. Through this repeated process of making and unmaking, the image moves away from a specific city and becomes closer to a landscape that might exist within memory.

 

In some works, I also use generative AI as part of the process of imagining cities that do not exist, or landscapes in which past, present, and future coexist.

 

Generative AI is not the subject of the work itself. The generated image is only a starting point. I dismantle and reconstruct it through paint, bodily movement, materiality, and chance until it becomes a painting of its own.