Yuki Fujioka
(b. 1993)
ActiveKumamoto City, Japan
BiographyWith just scissors and some scraps of paper, Yuki Fujioka creates feathery works with delicate color gradients. He meticulously and methodically cuts the smallest possible strips of paper, sometimes reducing the whole piece to wavy threads, other times framing the altered fringes of material with intact surfaces, resembling a messy comb. Colored additions in crayon often enhance one side of the uncut surfaces. The paper is always the ordinary ephemera of life—mailed flyers with their graphic advertisements still visible, copy paper, brochures, origami paper—but is transformed into incredibly tactile, sculptural objects.Creating art is part of the daily routine for Fujioka, who is autistic. Born in 1993 in Kumamoto, Japan, he started using scissors at the age of six as a medium for expressing himself. Although he experimented with collages of cutout paper shapes early on, he later shifted to thinly slicing a single page. With the support of his parents, his art became part of his daily rhythm: walks in the neighborhood, listening to music or watching TV, and then spending the late-night hours at his desk cutting patterns in paper. Some feature one long diagonal cut in addition to the smaller ones, which some viewers have interpreted as a signature-like touch.
An early exhibition was in a 2002 group show at the Kumamoto Modern Art Museum after his art was noticed hanging in his special needs school. International presentations of his work have now included showings by Yukiko Koide Presents at the Outsider Art Fair and at the 2023 exhibition Material Witness: Folk and Self-Taught Artists at Work at the American Folk Art Museum. As the years go on, he continues to create hundreds of works, which are becoming more precise and elaborate as he cuts ever finer lines of paper that float free in cascades of spirals and whirls.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
This artist’s work was reviewed as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).