KEN YASHIKI

Ken Yashiki trained in fashion and worked in the textile industry before turning to art. His practice revisits kimekomi, a traditional Japanese technique dating from the Edo period, in which fabric is inlaid into grooves carved in wood.

What he inlays is secondhand clothing, worn by real people. The technique becomes a form of portraiture — tactile, and charged with memory. Each garment arrives already marked by a life that was not his, and the work keeps that trace rather than erasing it.

He now exhibits regularly in galleries and at international art fairs, with works held in private collections across Japan, Europe and the United States.

Ken Yashiki was shown in Paris for the first time in Blooming of a Heritage at Sato Gallery in April 2025, and has since been presented at Urban Art Fair and KunstRAI Amsterdam.