Yukiko Nakashima

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

My abstract painting connotes to a specific event, memory or psychological state. The colors and the brush strokes represent fading fragments of the past. The are an analysis through recollection – each time I set a stroke of color, I’m reflecting on the unverbalized feelings that have accumulated in myself to acknowledge and bring them out of oblivion. It may be a black and white photograph that I saw at the Peace Memorial Museum in my hometown, Hiroshima, capturing the moment of erasure of life that lingers and urges me to visually analyze the mushroom cloud. Or the feeling of an unfulfilled wish when finding out that a letter that I have been waiting has not and will never come. Similarly to my upbringing, the paintings are a hybrid of the East and the West, traditional and contemporary, enmeshing into inseparable undulation to speak of the state of being stuck in between. My intention is to create a visual language that speaks the inner most feeling and to establish a psychological path that leads to remedy and acceptance for what has been suppressed deep inside.

Artwork