Yumiko Ono (b. 1987, Fukushima Prefecture) practice offers a compelling meditation on the ideals and contradictions of utopian architecture, as viewed through the lens of global modernism. Working primarily with slip-cast porcelain, tracing paper, textiles, and drawing, she creates installations that evoke imagined cities, forgotten monuments, and speculative futures. Her work draws from diverse architectural vocabularies—particularly those of Soviet-era planning, Japanese Metabolism, and post-war modernist design—reinterpreting them as fragile, often modular sculptural forms.
Her artistic practice which revolves around the exploration of utopian ideals through architecture, materiality, and repetition. Working primarily with slip-cast porcelain, tracing paper, textiles, and drawing, she constructs minimal yet conceptually layered installations that blur the line between imagined structures and historical forms. Drawing on her extensive research into Soviet and Japanese modernist architecture, Ono reinterprets historical aesthetics associated with progress, control, and idealism.
In Ono’s Utopia series, 196 hand-cast porcelain objects each weigh exactly 181 grams despite their differing shapes, a poetic gesture towards equality within difference. This tension between uniformity and individuality, permanence and impermanence, recurs throughout her oeuvre, prompting questions about the viability of collective ideals in an increasingly fragmented world.
Ono’s exhibitions often serve as immersive environments where architecture becomes both subject and metaphor. Her solo exhibition “Utopia” at Slag Gallery, New York (2019), presented a carefully calibrated porcelain cityscape that examined the symbolic weight of national borders and standardised systems. In “Unbuilt” (ARTHAUS, Moscow, 2022), she responded to unrealised Soviet architectural blueprints, reimagining these latent forms through a combination of ceramics, concrete, and textile. At MoCA Taipei’s “Epitomes” (2019–2020), Ono expanded her exploration into a transnational context, investigating how utopian principles manifest across cultures. Her participation in the Biwako Biennale (Japan, 2022) and exhibitions in Vietnam and the Czech Republic further reflect her sensitivity to place, material heritage, and the residues of ideological space. By situating her work within a matrix of research, memory, and speculative design, Ono invites viewers to reconsider the architectures that shape both our physical and psychological landscapes—not as fixed structures, but as mutable, contested, and deeply human.
Yumiko Ono has presented numerous solo exhibitions across Japan, Europe, and the United States over the past decade. In 2024, she exhibited Divers at the Nishi-Aizu International Art Village in Fukushima, Japan. Prior to that, during 2022–2023, she held a solo exhibition at the Consulate of Japan in Lyon, France. Also in 2022, she showed Au-delà du regard (Beyond the Gaze) at the Monastère de Sainte‑Croix in Drôme, France, and later that year, she presented View at Gallery Kazahana in Fukushima, Japan.
In 2019, she had three solo exhibitions: Breath Across the Sky at Gallery Kazahana in Fukushima, Moment at Niche Gallery in Tokyo, and the notable Utopia at Slag Gallery in New York, where she explored geopolitical themes through minimalist ceramic installations. Earlier in her career, she held an Open Studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2017. In 2015, she exhibited The River That Flows Through the Town at Niche Gallery in Tokyo, and in 2014, she had a solo exhibition at Sakuragi Fine Arts, also in Tokyo.
