Yuli Yamagata
Yuli Yamagata (Brazil, b. 1989) creates hybrid sculptural forms using textiles, resin, foam, ceramics, and everyday objects. Through stitching, layering, and assemblage, she transforms familiar materials into exuberant, corporeal structures that appear animated and alive. Drawing on the visual languages of comics, manga, popular culture, and consumer aesthetics, her works are populated by fantastical forms that oscillate between attraction and discomfort. Central to her practice is an exploration of materiality as an active force, where color, texture, flexibility, and tactility shape both form and meaning. By combining processes of accumulation, repair, and transformation, Yamagata constructs imaginative worlds that challenge distinctions between body and object, fiction and reality.
Recent solo exhibitions include Alô? at Universidade Católica do Porto (2025), Ghosts Don’t Wear Watches at Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2024), and Dois Pra Cá, Dois Pra Lá at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel | Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro (2023). Her work has been featured in major international exhibitions, including The House of Pikachu: Art, Anime, and Pop Culture at Asia Society Texas, Houston (2025–26), The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean at the Americas Society, New York (2024), and Vai, Vai Saudade at MADRE, Naples (2024).
Ribs, 2024
Elastane, fabric paint, silicone fiber, sewing thread, white glue, acrylic paint, glazed ceramics, anti-UV spray
100 x 70 x 4 cm | 39 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 in
Ribs originates from a visual and linguistic association between the rib-like structure suggested by the work’s form and the Monstera plant, commonly known in Portuguese as costela-de-adão (“Adam’s rib”). This interplay between botanical and anatomical references creates a layered network of meanings, connecting the organic world to cultural and mythological narratives.
The work also marks an important moment in Yamagata’s practice, coinciding with her early experiments in hand-dyeing fabrics. The dyed textiles incorporated into the piece reflect the artist’s growing interest in natural pigments and traditional dyeing processes, which introduce their own temporal dimension through gradual transformation, fading, and endurance.
Like many of her works, Ribs considers the passage of time through both human and botanical life cycles. By bringing together references to the body, plant growth, and material transformation, the work reflects on processes of aging, change, and continuity that connect living beings across different forms of existence.
Ikebana Snail, 2024
Snail shell, corn, glazed ceramic, epoxy resin, aluminum
40 x 26 x 26 cm | 15 3/4 x 10 1/4 x 10 1/4 in
Ikebana Snail emerges from Yuli Yamagata’s long-standing interest in floral arrangements and, in particular, the Japanese tradition of ikebana. Historically, ikebana has served not only as an expression of the changing seasons but also as a silent language through which emotions, life events, and states of being are communicated. For Yamagata, these arrangements become a way of reflecting on cycles of life, death, memory, and transformation.
The work combines ceramic elements, dried flowers preserved in resin, and found materials, including bones collected on a beach in Peru where seals come to die. Like many of the artist’s ikebana works, it is assembled from fragments removed from other sculptures and installations—pieces that no longer belonged elsewhere but found new life within the composition. In this sense, the work functions as a kind of personal archive or “cemetery” of past works, carrying traces of different moments, exhibitions, and creative processes.
Through these accumulated fragments, Ikebana Snail becomes a meditation on the passage of time. References to clocks and cyclical rhythms evoke themes of growth, decay, renewal, and memory, echoing the artist’s broader interest in how objects can embody multiple temporalities at once.
The work was featured in The House of Pikachu: Art, Anime, and Pop Culture at Asia Society Texas, an exhibition examining the influence of anime, manga, and popular culture on contemporary artistic practices.
