Amia Yokoyama
DOOMSDAYERS
© Amia Yokoyama, photo by Jonathan Chacon.
Amia Yokoyama operates as a material hacker, rejecting linear constructs of reality. Instead, she concentrates on world-building with porcelain sculptures and digital manipulations that embrace the genesis of alternative realities through multiplicity, glitches, and fantasy. The gooey quality of her work represents the concept of flux, a continuous regeneration of matter, time, and con- text, where a lump of clay can become a body, and a body can become a lump of clay in an eternal cycle. Yokoyama’s recurrent watery femme figures are metaphorical “clay bodies” inspired by the limitless worlds of anime and manga. They serve as avatars that unbound the spirit from the confines of a physical body subjected to fetishization. She uses porcelain explicitly because it is a historically and politically charged symbol of desire and commodification and as an entry point into her Japanese heritage, where the material problematically represents Asian femininity.
A new series of works comprising wall-mounted obsidian plaques become portals into another dimension inhabited by her clay avatars printed as holograms. The objects are anachronis- tic, with sleek “black mirrors” revealing Matrix-green images housed within earthy porcelain frames that do not attempt to hide the artist’s hand.
B. Illinois
Lives and works in Los Angeles CA
WW80
Amia Yokoyama, Perfect World Mirror, 2024, Ceramic, glaze, obsidian, holographic print, glass, and wood. © Gladstone Gallery and the artist, photo by R & Company.