Yoko Mazuki

Yoko Mazuki (b. 1963, Aichi Prefecture) is a Tokyo-based artist whose practice has quietly but consistently developed over the past three decades.

Mazuki’s work is rooted in photography, yet extends into video, installation and performance. She is best known for an introspective, sensory approach that explores the body, memory, time and perception — often through self-portraiture. Rather than depicting identity in a literal sense, her images focus on tactile experience: skin, breath, scent, and the subtle presence of the body within space. Many of her early works were made in the traditional Japanese house where she grew up, lending the images a deeply personal yet universal quality.

A recurring concept in her practice is that of “inner plants” — an imagined, organic life within the human body — which she uses as a metaphor for emotions, memory and unseen inner states. Her photographs are quiet, restrained and poetic, resisting narrative in favour of sensation and atmosphere.

In her more recent series ‘Marginalia’ - created during a period marked by personal loss and social isolation due the corona pandemic Mazuki explores the landscape as a layered and subjective experience rather than a fixed reality. Drawing on the notion of marginalia —notes written in the margins of a text—the series focuses on what lies beside or beneath our immediate perception.

Mazuki suggests that we see places through memory, emotion, and habit. Familiar landscapes are quietly overlaid with other times and spaces, creating images that feel both present and distant. Through subtle fragmentation and soft transitions, the works evoke moments of uncertain seeing, where peripheral impressions become as significant as what is clearly visible.

Using photographic images realised through printmaking techniques such as collotype and photopolymer gravure, Mazuki emphasises materiality and surface.

Mazuki has exhibited widely in Japan and internationally since the 1990s, with solo exhibitions in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Yokohama, Düsseldorf and Taipei, among others. More recently, she has presented the long-term project a priori (2016–2024), shown in Tokyo, Kyoto and Nagoya. In this body of work she also began collaborating with master printers to produce works using the historic collotype printing process, underlining her interest in materiality and photographic craftsmanship.

Her work has been published in several artist books, most notably a priori (2023), which brings together Japanese and English texts and reflects her belief in photography as a visual language that precedes words. Earlier publications include a priori innerplants (2013).