Yumiko Ono

An artist based in the United States and Japan. Worked in former socialist countries such as Russia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for nearly 10 years. Ono’s recent theme is utopia—an ideal world that only exists in imagination. By considering Japan, her country of origin, as a nation located in the middle of East and West, she conducts comparative research on U.S., Soviet Union, and Japanese utopian architecture. She creates drawings and porcelain works using molds based on the architecture. In her drawing, she traces and fills the image of a material’s surface to form an imaginary architecture with only the surface, and the process of porcelain molding creates a three-dimensional object by copying the surface of a three-dimensional object. That is to say, both mediums are highly connected to superficiality. By using these techniques, she attempts to form the interior and content from the surface.