Mai Yokoyama: Solar Phantasm : Solo Exhibition

Japanese artist Mai Yokoyama has long centered her practice on the question of what constitutes "the authentic" or "the real," examining the shifting relationship between digital media, painting, and the perception of time. Through a process that begins with digital sketches created on an iPad and watercolor-based source images, Yokoyama subsequently translates these compositions into oil paintings on canvas, allowing multiple forms of mediation and transformation to emerge across different materials and image-making systems.

Central to her practice is the notion of the "layer," a mechanism intrinsic to digital drawing yet equally embedded within the histories of printmaking and animation. Through layering, different moments, conditions, and temporalities are accumulated into a single image, forming a visual structure in which meaning remains unstable and continuously reconstructed. For Yokoyama, the image is never fixed or singular, but instead exists as an evolving accumulation of traces, revisions, and residual impressions.

In Solar Phantasm, the artist draws primarily from ancient ruins and archaeological artifacts encountered during extended periods of research in Italy and Greece. Confronted by these remnants shaped through centuries of erosion, burial, and excavation, the sensation of layering became increasingly tangible. What we now recognize as "ruins" are not preserved originals, but altered forms that have survived through immense spans of time. Their initial functions and meanings can only be inferred through fragmented remains and historical imagination.

Rather than attempting to recover an untouched or singular authenticity, the exhibition considers how objects persist while continuously undergoing transformation. These ancient structures occupy an ambiguous condition suspended between disappearance and endurance, existing like spectral presences within the contemporary world. Though their original purposes have faded, they continue to retain a form of existence beyond their former identities.

For Yokoyama, authenticity does not reside in permanence or an immutable origin, but instead emerges through processes of erosion, layering, and continual transformation, where traces of existence persist even as forms themselves remain in flux.