KATAHIRA YUFUKO Art Works

My works are based on the concept of “inner space,” understood as the psychological and sensory domain that exists within the body. By inner space, I am referring to the internal world we carry within us—formless thoughts and emotions, impulses before they become language, and the rhythms and breath that course through the body, often without our conscious awareness.

I approach the body as a space and construct images by tracing activities that occur within the body across the layers of the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious mind. These activities include subtle pre-emotional stirrings, fleeting tensions that emerge beneath the skin, and minute contractions that arise when anticipating contact with the external world. To externalize and visualize these internal bodily experiences, I work across multiple media, including oil painting, serigraphy, and installation.

I am interested in how the boundaries between oneself and others as well as between the inner and the outer intersect, fluctuate, and transform. In particular, I focus on the skin as a material membrane and on the thresholds of sensation it holds, exploring the subtle perceptions embedded in personal space and the distance between bodies.

Through this practice, I aim to pose the question of how we might imagine others as possessing inner experiences similar to our own. I further ask how such acts of imagination shape the boundaries and distances between persons.

In contemporary society, relationships and distances between individuals are often determined before they have fully perceived their own internal state. As a result, people may relate to others while remaining disconnected from their own bodily sensations, leading to misalignments and tensions in relation to their inner experience and interpersonal boundaries. By rendering these invisible inner spaces perceptible, I seek to create a space in which one can return to one’s own sensations and reconsider the distance and boundaries between self and others.

My hope is that my work can function as an entry point for viewers to engage with their own inner worlds and as an opportunity to attend to the complexity between external world and internal one , as well as the subtle resonances that emerge from this complexity.

The Birth of Shikkoku

The artist Yufuko Katahira once walked across a polished black lacquer floor and was captivated by the beauty of its luster emerging from the darkness of the shikkoku (jet black). In that moment, her sense of space became ambiguous, producing a sensation of floating, while her image seemed on the verge of emerging from the surface beneath her. Being inspired by this experience, she focused on the possibilities of black in oil painting and obtained a patent—an exceptional achievement in the art world.

Originally, the term shikkoku refers to the deep, lustrous black of lacquerware coated with black lacquer. It is often used to signify pure black or the darkest possible shade of black. Expressions such as shikkoku no yami (jet-black darkness) to describe dense darkness, or shikkoku no kami (jet-black hair) to describe glossy black hair, demonstrate how the term functions as an emotional and poetic articulation of blackness.

Incidentally, refined lacquer is originally a transparent brownish substance, and colored lacquers other than black (such as vermilion) are produced by mixing pigments into translucent lacquer. Black lacquer alone, however, is created differently: during the refining process, iron is added and undergoes oxidation, and the lacquer itself turns black. In this sense, lacquer black differs fundamentally from other black colors; it is a black achievable only through lacquer itself—a black color like no other.

Katahira therefore pursued research into a texture enveloped in jet black to overcome problems associated with gloss expression in oil painting, such as yellowing and diffuse reflection. A patent is defined as “a creation of technical ideas utilizing the laws of nature and possessing novelty,” and such knowledge gradually permeates society in a sharable form. Thus, a new black in oil painting, a distinctive black worthy of being called shikkokushoku (jet-black color) was born.

“Beyond the Skin, the Cosmos”

As the writer J. G. Ballard observed, attempts to explore inner space—the invisible mental world, the unconscious, the preconscious, dreams, and inner impulses—have repeatedly surfaced in modern and contemporary art. In this sense, Yufuko Katahira may also be situated within the genealogy of “iconographers of inner space,” from Symbolist explorations in interiority, to Surrealists’ investigations of the unconscious, and to Abstract Expressionist visualization of inner experience.

What distinguishes Katahira, however, is that she does not limit her works to the realm of autobiographical introspection. Instead, Katahira presents her works as relational spaces that compel the reconsideration of complex relationships with others through which viewers are drawn. In this regard, her works also resonate with current trends in contemporary art that emphasize reception, relationality, and synesthetic experience.

Furthermore, this relational perspective is evident in the artist’s emphasis on skin as a motif. According to the concept of the “skin-ego” proposed by psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, skin is not merely a boundary separating oneself and another; it is a container that holds psychic contents, a membrane through which the ego is formed through contact with others. From the perspective of the skin-ego, Katahira’s works do not merely express interiority. Rather, physical sensations evoked by Katahira’s Resonance Paintings (works that absorb and reflect the image of the viewer) expose the conditions through which interiority is constituted.

An inner space emerges upon the jet-black surface of these paintings—sinking yet floating—a site where the outer and inner cosmos encounter one another and where both self and other come into being through mutual relation.

Yufuko Katahira’s Perspective on the Inside and the Outside

For human beings, creative activity is cultivated through unceasing observation and insight into oneself and one’s surroundings, as well as through imagination and curiosity. This process constitutes a fundamental principle shared by artists, writers, scientists, and engineers alike. In the past, conservative social attitudes, particularly in Japan, often prescribed that artistic and scientific inclinations stood in opposition and ought to remain separate. Today, however, contemporary explorations of creativity increasingly recognize such boundaries as unnecessary and inherently borderless.

In pursuit of forms of expression, Yufuko Katahira has refused to cling to established techniques and materials, questioned their conventional usage, and ultimately brought forth a visual world and set of effects distinct from previous approaches. This appears entirely inevitable when considered alongside the origins of her practice. As exemplified by Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer during the Renaissance or by the Surrealists Man Ray and Max Ernst in the modern era, it has never been alien or objectionable for artists to devise their own methods or introduce new technologies and materials to realize their expressive worlds.

Specifically, regarding Katahira’s artistic practice and concepts, one finds that the construction of visual effects and modes of expression that provoke an awareness of interiority—one that extends beyond physical meaning for both the artist and the viewer—is structured around what she calls “inner space.” Her works are spatially engaging in modes that depart from conventional notions of painting, such as stretched canvases or standard frames. Moreover, the mirror-like polished surfaces applied to Katahira’s pictorial planes, through multilayered processes involving transparency, suggest textures akin to viscosity or dampness. 

The motifs of these pictorial spaces are rendered through distortions and deformations that, at first glance, appear almost Mannerist in nature. More accurately, however, they may be understood as topological transformations into coordinates and dimensions that differ from the spatial frameworks through which we ordinarily perceive the world.

For both the artist and viewer, this is not simply a visual matter. These motifs test sensory, psychological, and even cosmological approaches to the self and space. Furthermore, to lead viewers toward the boundaries that divide the work’s interior from the external world, Katahira juxtaposes unusual motifs with heterogeneous techniques or places cracks and accretions on the surface, attempting to evoke something existing between inside and outside.

Viewers may understand the surface as a shell or membrane, a boundary inherent to the existence of the artwork itself. Yet through Katahira’s interplay of vision and perception, which transcends materiality, one may also become aware of boundaries reminiscent of those proposed in quantum theory, where no fixed material territory exists. Smooth hardness coexists with moist softness, while the image remains flat yet simultaneously generates topological visual experiences resembling semi-solid forms. Although these are contradictions, they also become points of departure leading toward explorations of the self and others as composite entities.

The presence that enables perception of the inner and outer underlying such forms of consciousness cannot ultimately be explained through material properties such as solidity, liquidity, or gas. Rather, it may be connected to the Eastern concept of “Ki”(気), often translated as “life force,” “vital energy,” or “spirit,” which has been embraced across cultures and throughout history.

The “Resonance Painting” method should, therefore, not be understood merely as a technique for the surface treatment of a painting but, instead, as a detonating mechanism that induces the expansion of multilayered and synergistic spatiality experienced simultaneously with mirror-like reflected imagery.

I believe that the concepts and experiences of inner and outer vision, as well as consciousness itself, are revealed not through fixed boundaries or an outer shell but through questions of perspective and distance. One senses a profound sympathy for this domain throughout Katahira’s works and artistic practice.