Yusuke Onuma (b. 1983, Tokyo) is a painter whose practice explores the transformation of outlines and shadows into pure color and shape. Having started painting seriously in his mid-twenties, Onuma has cultivated a unique pictorial language since the late 2000s.
Your work often features the human body in expressive and symbolic ways. What does the body represent in your art?
The human body has been the ultimate model for artists since ancient times. By expressing it in my own way, I feel a connection with the great artists of the past.
Many of your compositions feel theatrical and dramatic. Is Japanese culture — like Kabuki theatre — an influence in your visual language?
I don’t consciously focus on my own national culture, but perhaps my comfort with flat surfaces and clearly defined contours comes from something deeply rooted — maybe a kind of Japanese DNA engraved within me.
Your use of color is bold and luminous. How do you choose your palette, and what role does color play in your storytelling?
In my paintings, color and form exist to enhance each other. Sometimes color restrains the excess of form, and at other times gentle forms calm the overflow of color. This interplay creates drama on the canvas.
What emotions or reactions do you hope to evoke in the viewer when they see your work?
A painter can control the work itself, but never the viewer’s emotions or reactions. I’m satisfied simply by being able to bring a painting into existence.
What does contemporary art mean to you, and how do you see your place within it?
In a contemporary art world dominated by quotation, imitation, and algorithmic reproduction, my mission is to explore a self-constructed order — one that does not depend on any preexisting style.
This is not a return to the past, but rather a challenge to the fixed idea that original figurative expression no longer exists.
A personal anecdote
What I’ve realized through years of painting is that the concepts or beliefs I embed in my work hold no real value for the viewer.
It is often the artist himself who limits the potential of a work. I believe that the painter’s final task is to set the painting free from those constraints at the very moment it is completed.
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