Untitled (C. F. Z. Beatson 2D11, Victorian)

Yuma Tomiyasu was born in Hiroshima, Japan, 1983 and currently lives and
works in London. She completed a BA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and
Design in 2009.

Her prime concept with her paintings is to reveal the spirituality of objects. This is greatly influenced by Japanese animism such as Shinto, whom its belief is that all things have their own spirits. By bringing in highly personal and meditative aspects into her paintings dealing with human figures, she has been investigating an original and creative way to prompt viewers to rethink and contemplate on the importance of spirituality in human life.

With her works, she is attempting to explore the boundary between figurative depiction and an accidental abstraction. Technically, her paintings could be categorised as ‘portraits’ but she considers them not to own the conventional function of portraits as the formal particularity of a depicted individual (s) is disappearing from her canvas and hence they shift and assimilate to the abstract side.

By not depicting figuration, or not devoting herself to abstraction, Tomiyasu’s experimentation seeks the ‘in between’ of the body and the mind.