Aichi Triennale 2025: A Time Between Ashes and Roses, Period:September 13 to November 30, 2025, 79 days, Venues: Aichi Arts Center, Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum, Seto CityAichi Triennale 2025: A Time Between Ashes and Roses, Period:September 13 to November 30, 2025, 79 days, Venues: Aichi Arts Center, Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum, Seto City

What’s On

Tomiyasu Yuma

  • Contemporary Art
  • Seto City

Exhibition

  • Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2025
  • Tomiyasu Yuma, The Silence (Two Suns), 2025
  • ©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee
  • Photo: Kido Tamotsu
Description

Walking through an old, but somehow familiar, shopping arcade, there is a distinctive building with a display window totally covered with mirrors. What used to be a greengrocer’s shop seems to have transformed into an other-worldly space, like some sort of parallel reality.
Tomiyasu Yuma focused on the invisible characteristics and the signs that the place gives out to create a work that uses paintings, video, lighting, and other techniques to enable viewers to fully experience the space. Through her work, Tomiyasu delves into what lies between dichotomies such as life and death or reality and fiction. Mechanisms such as lighting that turns on and off, repeating motifs, and nested spaces induce an inexplicable unease, giving viewers the sense of being in a dream as they experience the worldview she has created.
Entering through an automatic door, the floor is covered by piles of fine sand called Suna Kira, tailings left over from the process of refining silica sand mined in Seto. Here and there are flowers created from Seto clay. These unfired clay flowers are very fragile, and over time they fall over, eventually merging into the pile of sand.
Tomiyasu’s work resonates with the Aichi Triennale 2025 theme, A Time Between Ashes and Roses. Like an abandoned property with no signs of human habitation, the space is perhaps indicative of our fate in a world of unceasing war.

Venue

Pop Up Shop

Profile

  • Born 1983 in Hiroshima, Japan. Based in Tokyo, Japan.

Tomiyasu Yuma creates works that explore the boundary between reality and unreality, using as motifs unseen things and matters that have not been scientifically elucidated, such as psychic and paranormal phenomena and dreams. Recent works include large-scale experiential installations that make viewers aware of overlapping perspectives and shifts of dimensions, using diverse media including painting, sculpture, video, sound, VR, and theatrical staging. She has a strong interest in the nested structure of paintings such as picture-within-a-picture, and in her most recent works in particular, Tomiyasu has presented installations in which nested paintings are important objects. The artist picks up on uncertainties and ambiguities that are often overlooked in contemporary society, and explores structures that allow viewers to experience the overlapping of dimensions and a bird’s-eye view of the world.

Selected exhibitions
2023
Solo exhibition, In Presence of Shadows, Maruki Gallery For The Hiroshima Panels (Saitama, Japan)
2022
Setouchi Triennale 2022, Teshima (Kagawa, Japan)
2021–22
Solo exhibition, Aperto 15 TOMIYASU Yuma, The Pale Horse, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (Ishikawa, Japan)
2021
Solo exhibition, KAAT EXHIBITION 2020: Yuma Tomiyasu: Shadows of Wandering, KAAT Kanagawa Arts Theater (Japan)
2018
Solo exhibition, 12th shiseido art egg: Yuma Tomiyasu: Obsessed With Dreams, Shiseido Gallery (Tokyo, Japan)
  • “The Doom” 2021
  • Photo: Masanobu Nishino
  • Courtesy of Art Front Gallery.