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⚫︎Yukino Tanaka（Curator, Okazaki City Museum）
June 2026
For Things Lost to Oblivion: The Beautiful Cenotaphs of Yurika Araki
—“Araki-san, what exactly is attached here?”
Standing before a work that possessed a strange yet captivating allure, I found myself asking instinctively.
—“Goat hooves.”
It was an answer that effortlessly overturned my assumption that it might be a mineral or perhaps a piece of wood. While the very fact that such an unusual material as goat hooves could be obtained is surprising, what moved me even more was that this material had been reconstituted into an artwork by Yurika Araki’s hands. At that moment, a certain poetic line came to mind:
“Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.”
This famous phrase by the 19th-century poet Comte de Lautréamont expresses a strange, eerie, yet mysterious beauty that arises when unrelated things meet in an unexpected place. It captivated the Surrealists, the leading figures of the greatest artistic movement of the 20th century. This aesthetic is deeply connected to the technique known as “dépaysement,” frequently employed by them. Dépaysement, meaning “to displace something from its original context into another,” creates a powerful sense of incongruity and new meaning by placing an object in an entirely different environment. Lautréamont’s phrase is often cited as a symbolic example of this. In Araki’s work as well, the unexpected nature of her materials and their transformed placement embody this very technique. While goat hooves are among her more unusual materials, she also works with everyday manufactured items such as high heels, spoons, measuring tapes, beads, and toys. In her hands, these objects reveal new qualities latent within them.
Araki’s method of production is assemblage: combining diverse materials to construct forms that seem familiar yet have never existed before. While incorporating ornaments and daily commodities that we encounter in everyday life, she carefully scoops up what is seen yet overlooked, what we pass by without noticing, gathering and reconstructing them through her unique aesthetic sensibility. Her creative process begins with the collection of materials that her sharpened perception deems usable. She captures fleeting moments of incongruity hidden within ordinary scenes and never lets them go. Perhaps because the materials she uses are relatively familiar, people sometimes bring items to her. These collected materials wait their turn in her studio—it may be one day later, three years later, or even five years later; even the artist herself does not know.One important process in her practice is sorting products by “color.” Here, she adopts a flat, impersonal perspective, following the color names assigned to products rather than her own preferences. She devised this method after finding that, in her early practice, collecting only her favorite reds resulted in monotony. She also avoids applying her own colors, saying that “once you paint them, any everyday object will do.” Coloring them herself would make it far easier to make them look like “art,” but it would also create uniformity, stripping away depth and fluctuation. To uniformly color ready-made objects might mean, for Araki, removing the identity inherent in the material and the narrative embedded in the product itself.
Her recent works begin from the theme suggested by the title: “Planets, Standing Like Goats or Feathers.” In particular, her fascination with goats is strong. This relates both to her admiration for their ability to climb unstable surfaces effortlessly, seemingly defying gravity, and to the fact that she herself is a Capricorn. One reason she is drawn to goats lies in her constant engagement with questions of center of gravity, balance, and proportion. Her works may be assembled and suspended from the ceiling, or stabilized on a pedestal. In either case, she must decisively determine where to attach each element and at what angle to present it. During construction, delicate judgments are required—raising the center of gravity or carefully considering it in adhesion. Her attraction to goats, with their supple bodies and exceptional balance, may be seen as a unique yet inevitable motif born from her pursuit of balance and structural beauty.
Araki often uses high heels in her works. Many are titled simply by the colors she has sorted, but she has also developed a series titled “Forms Seen in Birds and High Heels.” In the latter, sharp shapes reminiscent of beaks and forms suggestive of spreading wings appear throughout. Here, the organic presence of birds and the artificiality of high heels are gently connected, stimulating the viewer’s imagination. These high-heel series are among her signature works, often dazzling and dreamlike. Because high heels are easily associated with fashion, her works are frequently linked to it. However, while fashion belongs to applied arts with practical functions, Araki’s works belong to fine art, created primarily for contemplation. This marks a fundamental difference.Rather than dwelling on superficial associations, it is worth considering a deeper relationship. One of the most important elements of fashion is proportion. Clothing is constructed by sewing together different materials—fabric, buttons, zippers—and through this combination, heterogeneous elements are reborn as a single garment. Further, by selecting and combining multiple garments according to color and form, a unique style emerges for each body. This process of combination, reconstruction, and adjustment of proportion in fashion resonates deeply with Araki’s practice. While each material is utilized to its fullest potential, her completed works and installations present entirely different impressions when viewed microscopically versus macroscopically. Yet both perspectives reveal a refined beauty—an embodiment of Araki’s perfect world. She moves freely between micro and macro viewpoints, constructing space and form. By severing materials from their existing systems of meaning and generating new values, her works symbolize the sensibilities of a contemporary world in constant flux. Once gathered by her, things that might have been forgotten regain their brilliance and begin a new path.
At the core of her creative impulse seem to lie two axes: life and death. This is evident in her respect and curiosity toward ready-made objects that fill our surroundings, and in her attitude of reconstructing them to create new value. When collecting materials, she always reflects on where they came from and for what purpose they were made. This reflects a desire to cherish their histories and receive their narratives with care. When I once asked what she wished to convey through her work, she replied:
—“I’d be happy if people a hundred years from now rediscovered my works as if they were fossils, and imagined what kind of strange things once existed in this world.”
Within Araki’s works resides a prayer-like possibility: that fragments of daily life we might dismiss as “junk” can be transformed into art. Materials rediscovered by her are endowed with new stories, reborn, and set into circulation. In this sense, her work aligns with a positive aspect of capitalist society—the transformation and creation of value—while simultaneously functioning as an antithesis to mass consumption. Many objects dismissed as “junk” are products of such a society, rendered unnecessary once trends pass. Among her materials are those on the verge of sinking into oblivion. She gives them new narratives and passes them into the future.I describe her works as “beautiful cenotaphs” because a cenotaph inscribes the names and deeds of the dead, functioning as a device of memory that connects their traces to the future. It exists for the living, carrying new stories forward. In this sense, its role as both a memorial and a spiritual support resonates deeply with her works. Just as a cenotaph reinterprets inscribed meanings within new contexts, reconnecting memory, her works give new stories to things on the brink of oblivion and quietly regenerate them. The fragments revived by her hands resemble beautiful cenotaphs dedicated to things lost to oblivion.
The “beauty” in Araki’s work is inherently ambivalent. As noted earlier, her fundamental creative impulse lies in the dual axes of life and death—not opposing forces, but ones that continually circulate and repeat. While her works appear to present a complete aesthetic world, the fact that her method is continuously repeated suggests an endless chain—like mirrors facing each other, generating infinite reflections.
Just as a “beautiful cenotaph” evokes both beauty and death, beneath the surface beauty of her works lies the very existence of the materials themselves. Indeed, by pursuing beauty to its utmost and making it an end in itself, the subtle distortions and fundamental incongruities that arise when heterogeneous materials are combined become even more sharply visible.
In this sense, Araki’s “beautiful cenotaphs” contain a critical perspective on the very framework of beauty. They invert the question of what beauty is, quietly unsettling existing systems and values while striving to transcend them.
⚫︎Yukino Tanaka（Curator, Okazaki City Museum）
An interview with me was published in the quarterly magazine of the Okazaki City Museum Of Art
July 2025
⚫︎Takashi Ishizaki (Curator, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art)
January 2024
Shimmering Chimera–Yukari Araki's Ready-Colored Sculptures
When I picked up a small work hanging from the ceiling at her solo exhibition, she turned it upside down and showed me, saying, "You can hang it here or connect it to the metal fittings over here". At that moment, I was reminded of the floating nature of Araki Yukari's works, which are often exhibited in the form of hanging pieces. The fact that the top and bottom of the work can be altered means that the assemblage was probably created by joining objects together while rotating them in various directions.
On the other hand, there are works with a clearly defined top and bottom, such as the series of high heels.Several slender columns have been introduced to nestle into the shoe shapes, pushing the work's center of gravity upwards, resulting in an architectural structure with a highly hollow space.The first part is a hanging piece, and the second part, a high-heeled piece, vividly visualizes gravity by laying bare the structure that supports the weight.In this context, both works are rooted in the same idea.Objects with different identities live a second life that differs from their original use by being incorporated into Araki's work.
She usually collects material (ready-made items from her surroundings) that could be used in her works, and recently some people have been bringing their unwanted items that Araki seems to like.The objects collected this way are color-coded, for example, pink and blue, and used in the assemblage.However, there is surprisingly little consistency of color in the finished work. Rather, the appearance of the work gives a mixed impression: glossy, matte, transparent, reflecting light…. The variety of materials in the assemblage is natural, but the heterogeneity of the materials is emphasized, and the chimeric impression is strengthened by daring to group them in a single color.
However, even so, the starting point of the work is the color-categorization ritual of what color it is categorized as, and Araki does not color the work herself, but rather acts as a passive categorizer of the colors of the material that is distributed as a commodity. Today, it seems that a product, be it general merchandise or clothing, can only be distributed as a commodity if it is available in several different colors. It is as if it is a good thing to increase options by offering a wide variety of colors. (But is it really an option?)
It is in this respect that I would like to call Araki's work ready-colored sculpture. And by the fact that, despite the fact that color is an important requirement of the work, what the artist does is not coloring but selection, Araki's work raises questions about the ontology of color. It is a variation on the question that the readymade once posed to the act of making, in the form of what color is.
In terms of following readymade colors, some may recall the work of Tony Cragg, who arranges found pieces of plastic according to hue.In his case, by limiting himself to plastic, the most 20th-century material, the work took on a kind of civilization-critical aspect.Araki's work brings to light our 21st-century taste for coloring everything in the same way, regardless of what the material is. Perhaps because her work gives a shimmering impression, it is often seen as fashionable or design-oriented. However, the essence of her work is to expose contemporary society's obsession with colour, and to 'bleach' our unconscious trust in the uncertainty of color.
