Artwork: Nami Yokoyama, Shape of Your Words, 2026
Nami Yokoyama’s paintings of handwritten neon signs began with words written in her own hand, then she asked others to write words such as “love” in theirs, transcribing them into a form of signage that depersonalised, but also suggested an individual script, as no two paintings of the same word are alike. Yokoyama uses English as she recognises its use throughout the world, even though her mother-tongue is Japanese. While the use of English and its history, sometimes enforced rather than freely adopted, is problematic, for Yokoyama it is about the potential to communicate with words that can be recognised across cultural boundaries, and the possibility that the feelings associated with the words are also commonly experienced. Handwriting asserts the individual, their bodies and feelings, that acts as a counterweight to the dominance or conformity of the English language for those who don’t use it as their native tongue. Her current show at PARCEL gallery in Tokyo is titled Delivering Presence and Yokoyama wrote this about the exhibition:
“‘How can we truly feel the presence of you, and me, and someone we’ve never met?’
This question forms the starting point of my practice. If we could truly feel the presence of someone far away—someone we’ve never even met—just as we feel our own, maybe we would all see how foolish it is to hurt one another. This premise underlies my ongoing act of ‘Delivering Presence.’
In my work, English is no longer a language belonging to any particular person; it becomes a vessel through which people of all backgrounds may meet. When I trace the outline of words that have spread across the world and its meaning blurred over time, those words slip free from their fixed definition, and the person who wrote them begins to emerge. The paintings of “I am” and “Here” presented in this exhibition, alongside the new work “Shape of Your Response” in which I posed the question "where" and a friend replied "here," cannot be reduced to the exchange of information. When a word sheds its meaning and appears as pure form, what emerges goes beyond translation, as the presence of another person.
This act of delivering presence is also carried out through my own body. The tin installation, where a cast sculpture is made for every year of my life, is a direct attempt of making the time I have lived physically present. With each casting made from the previous year, the soft tin loses its shape, blurring until the human form dissolves. This process resonates with the nature of words as they spread through the world, their contours expanding and dissolving.
My hope is that these works offer a way of delivering wavering presence to others, becoming a site of tangible encounter that binds your existence, mine, and that of a stranger.”
Delivering Presence is showing until October 10, 2026