Megumi Yamaura “Portraits of Time”

Sato Sakura Museum

[Image: Megumi Yamaura "From the Books on My Table - Triangles #01" (2021)]

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Portraits of Time represents the first ever solo exhibition outside of Japan for Hiroshima-based Nihonga artist Megumi Yamaura. Collecting a total of 18 recent works of various sizes, the show presents an exploration of spatio-temporal aesthetics, with particular attention paid to Yamaura’s representational portrait motifs.

An Inyu ranked member of the prestigious Nihon Bijutsuin Japan Academy of Fine Arts and a faculty lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts at Hiroshima University, Yamaura has been actively researching and exhibiting Nihonga professionally for over fifteen years. In her first international debut, Portraits of Time presents a closer look at the artist’s principal theme - time - as seen through her representational collage-like paintings of people, objects, botanicals, and landscapes.

In her paintings, Yamaura’s focus goes beyond her motifs, and reaches to connect to the flow of time surrounding them - her oeuvre an ongoing exploration of the intersection of time in which humanity has lived, and that of the landscapes and scenes of her paintings. Through her use of traditional Japanese spatial aesthetics like yohaku and painting materials such as mineral pigments, sumi-ink, Japanese washi paper, and metal foils - Yamaura capitalizes on the physical properties of her material set as she seeks to express a harmony between the ‘beauty of the present and ephemeral,’ and ‘that which has been changed over time.’

Megumi Yamaura was Born in Hiroshima and holds a PhD of Fine Arts from the University of Hiroshima. In addition to her submissions to Nihon Bijutsuin’s INTEN exhibitions, Yamaura has been featured in numerous solo and group shows throughout Japan. In 2018 she embarked on an extended research trip to the Hannover University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Germany where she surveyed the concepts of spatial art and expression styles of Germany. In doing so, she sought to deepen her understanding of how the traditional aesthetic sense of time and space in Japanese Nihonga painting is in fact, a global concept.