Yuko Nasu

Yuko Nasu is a multidisciplinary artist based in Japan whose practice moves fluidly between painting and digital media. She graduated from the MA Fine Art program at Central Saint Martins in London, where she developed a visual language grounded in traditional fine art while expanding into digital methodologies.

Her early professional career unfolded within the gaming industry as a CG designer, where she refined a high level of technical precision and visual construction. Alongside this, her work began to receive attention within the London art scene. At the height of this momentum, however, her practice entered a prolonged period of introspection. This decade of distance was not an absence of creation, but a critical re-examination of authorship, identity, and the conditions of image production in contemporary society.

Nasu’s recent body of work, Imaginary Portrait, emerges from this reflection. The series explores the quiet melancholy embedded in consumer culture and the gradual dissolution of individuality in an era defined by excess information and accelerated visual consumption. Rather than depicting identifiable subjects, she constructs ambiguous figures through layered ink bleeds and fragmented digital strata. These faces ...

2006 MA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London UK
1997 BFA Visual Design, Kyoto City University of Arts, Kyoto Japan

2009 Jerwood Drawing Prize
2008 Jerwood Contemporary Painters
2006 Bloomberg New Contemporaries

-----solo show

2010 Quinquennial , Stour Space, London, England
2009 detective, I-MYU projects, London, England
John Doe , the Arts Gallery, London, England
Shadow Mirror- Imagined portraits of unknown people , Void Gallery, Seoul, South Korea
2007 Imaginary Portrait , Zizi Gallery, London, England


-----selected group show

2010 Depth Charge - Henrijs Preiss & Yuko Nasu, James Freeman Gallery, London, England
Shadowside, Bo.Lee Galley, Bath, England
3AM '..sounds eternal..." , Cobden Club, London, England
BAD IGLOO LUST, The Royal Standard, Liverpool, England
FACE, Shanghai, China
The Franks-Suss Collection - Phillips de Pury & Company The Saatchi Gallery, London, England
A Visual Dialogue Bo.Lee Gallery, Bath, England
2009 The Ivy The Ivy Restaurant, London, England
Off Centre Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
NO-ism Bodhi Gallery, London, England
Five Years Sesame Gallery, London, England
2008 Jerwood Contemporary Painters Jerwood Space, England & Wales
Art Beijing 2008 Beijing, China
The Future 50 Project Space Leeds, England

Characters: The people behind the portraits Atkinson Galler...