BIOGRAPHY
Yosuke Sugawara is a Japanese contemporary artist based in Tokyo whose practice centers on photography. Since 2023, he has been producing artworks that focus on fluctuations in vision and perception, and the relationship between image and reality. Thematically, he explores visual phenomena such as reflection, distortion, and inversion.
While using photography as a starting point, he attempts to reconfigure visual structures by expanding his interest to image processing through custom-developed programs, as well as to material acts of depiction and their traces. Employing a cross-media approach, he continues his production with an experimental practice, consistently exploring the "structure of seeing" and the "slippage between image and reality."
From 2025 onwards, he has incorporated image processing through proprietary software, developing an experimental art practice that re-examines the visual experience through cross-media endeavors centered on the "structure of seeing" and the subtle misalignments between vision and reality.
He focuses his interest on the domain where antithetical elements intersect: the boundary between the digital and the physical, the control of algorithms and the contingency of bodily acts, and the certainty and chance inherent in the creative process. From within this tension and fluctuation, he explores new perspectives and expressive possibilities. By moving between construction and deviation, intention and transformation, he highlights the instability of that which emerges as an "image," bringing a flicker to the contours of the visual experience.
This practice confronts the state of the image as it traverses the boundaries between dichotomies such as the abstract and the concrete, information and matter, representation and metamorphosis. Using the interplay of structures—the visible and the invisible, surface and reverse, the image and its latency—as a guide, he establishes a space that affirms the discrepancies, ambiguities, and uncertainties that vision cannot fully grasp. By doing so, he gently unsettles and reconfigures the perceptual frameworks and structural logics that underlie visual experience.
PROFILE
YOSUKE SUGAWARA
Born in Fukuoka, Japan in 1976. In his early career, Sugawara deeply engaged in the design of digital interfaces and the structuring and visualization of information within digital environments. He dedicated extensive time to exploring the logical aspects of information and digital imagery, as well as the process of constructing their inherent order.
In 2011, he transitioned his field to become a florist. Through the organic medium of plants, he deepened his understanding of the material world—engaging with the accidental forms, unpredictable growth, and the ephemeral nature of matter as it transforms and decays over time.
He later returned to the realm of digital expression. From a perspective that traverses his experiences in both the digital and physical domains, he began exploring unique possibilities for his own artistic expression. In 2023, he commenced his full-scale artistic practice in Tokyo.
CV
b. 1976, Fukuoka, Japan
Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan.
EDUCATION
- 1999 B.A. in English and American Literature, Senshu University
- 2001 Filmmaking Course, Nikkatsu Academy of Arts
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
- 2023 - Present Artist, Tokyo
- 2016 - Present Continued exploration and practice of visual structures within digital environments
- 2011 - 2016 As a florist, deeply engaged with the temporality and organic forms of plant life
- 2004 - 2011 Involved in he logical structuring and visualization of digital media at an organization focused on information architecture
- 2001 - 2004 Engaged in the construction and exploration of visual perception in digital environments at a creative studio