From MUSE (2025-), which keeps time at the Seseragi Terrace of the South Building of Grand Front Osaka, to the way in which LOVERS (2024) offered up a hymn to love at Tokyo’s Omotesando intersection, if you have ever crossed paths somewhere with Sasaoka Yuriko’s work, it may well stay with you for the rest of your life. Sasaoka’s work embodies a worldview that is energetic, captivating, and utterly unique.

Sasaoka Yuriko was born in Osaka Prefecture in 1988. She unit acquired full-term withdrawal from her doctoral studies in Media Art at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Kyoto City University of Arts in 2014. She has received numerous awards, including the Kyoto Prefecture Cultural Award Encouragement Prize (2020), the Sakuya Konohana Award (2020), and the Grand Prize at Kyoto Art for Tomorrow 2019—Kyoto Prefecture Emerging Artists Exhibition. She is currently based in Shiga Prefecture.

Sasaoka has been creating works using video since 2011. Her pieces feature characters she portrays herself, or figures that incorporate various parts of her face or body. While these slightly uncanny, comical characters existed solely within the moving images in her early works, however, the relationship between these images and the characters has flipped or inverted in her more recent pieces. For example, the eyes and mouths of characters that exist as three-dimensional objects have been replaced by video footage.
In addition, these characters sing songs composed by Sasaoka herself. Set to marching-style melodies, they convey Sasaoka’s simple yet powerful messages that address themes like love and family within each work.
Another distinctive characteristic of Sasaoka’s work can be found in the way that she deliberately retains editorial noise in an era saturated with images consisting of virtual realities that are indistinguishable from actual reality. This approach can be seen as a parallel to the way that brushstrokes operate in painting, as Sasaoka seeks to explore the painterly qualities to be found in video.

The Shiga Museum of Art is pleased to announce “Sasaoka Yuriko’s Paradise Dungeon,” her first solo exhibition at a museum. This exhibition explores the relationship between video and the characters in Sasaoka’s work, as well as the evolution of that relationship. It features a showcase ranging from her earliest works to pieces exhibited in recent years, alongside new works created specifically for this show.

A dimly lit dungeon of exhibition galleries where slightly uncanny characters sing of love with sincere devotion. We invite you to enter the world of Sasaoka Yuriko’s work.