âA figure leans into the cold, glossy as armor, soft as breath, unsure where the body ends and the city begins.â
The City as Skin
Yutaro Inagaki paints the kind of bodies you recognise before you fully understand them.
Black clad figures slip through synthetic streets, their jackets shining like memory compressed into surface.
Works shown from 2023 onward, including âEmpty Consumptionâ at DâStassi Art in London, his presentation at CAN Art Fair, the exhibition XTR curated by Con_Tokyo at Wall_alternative, his showing with The Hole NYC at NADA Art Fair, @studiya.gallery curated by @artcnomads and the upcoming solo in Paris, keep one foot in reality and another in a colder, speculative world.
Ernst Koslitsch
Yutaro Inagaki - Group-show Dead Dogs don´t Die at Slug Leipzig
His imagery reflects how big cities shape emotional behaviour, how people move through crowd systems while carrying their private weather.
Armor, Gesture, Breath
For Inagaki, the puffer jacket is not fashion. It is a membrane that records pressure and warmth, a shell that stores gesture.
In paintings like Dance 01, the body twists away from the frame, folds catching light as if they were reading the room.
The background stays atmospheric, neither location nor abstraction, more like the residue of a place you once passed through at night.
The feeling is familiar. The form is new. This is the emotional architecture of his cities, where bodies learn to survive by softening into their own armor.
The DOG B Series
The DOG B sculptures extend this language. Dog like forms wrapped in black puffers or built from discarded keyboard keys shift between creature and device.
They wait rather than act, loyal yet unreadable.
Yutaro Inagaki, Dog C (left), foam and puffer jacket material, and Dog A (right), foam and black keyboard keys. Courtesy of the artist.
These works imagine companionship in the winter era he describes, a time defined by economic chill and compressed feeling.
The dog becomes a partner made from the leftovers of contemporary life, a guardian of the emotional cold front that hangs over the city.
It is survival rendered with tenderness.
Scenes from a Synthetic Street
Many of Inagakiâs canvases behave like stills from a film that never resolves.
Figures gather in clusters, faceless and hooded, sometimes caught mid movement. Others lean into darkness, shiny surfaces picking up the faintest glow of streetlights.
The works from XTR, curated by Con_Tokyo at Wall_alternative, sharpen this atmosphere. They read as scenes rehearsing for impact.
You sense the weight of a world that has learned to absorb shock. Inagaki is not illustrating cities. He is mapping the emotional tension that moves through them.
Why This Work Matters
His work matters because it captures a truth many cities hide. Anonymity does not erase emotion. It only redirects it.
The puffer jacket becomes a form of quiet communication, a surface that remembers cold, pressure and time.
Viewers recognise themselves in these bodies, even without faces, because the emotional temperature feels accurate to contemporary life.
His art registers the push and pull between self protection and connection, between collective rhythm and individual breath.
Inagaki shows how modern survival shapes the body and how the body quietly resists.
About Yutaro Inagaki
Born outside Tokyo and now based in London, Inagaki works across painting, sculpture and installation.
His early experiences with graffiti and urban exploration remain visible in the way he reads the city as both subject and stage.
Influences from Japanese sci fi like Akira and Ghost in the Shell appear as atmospheric cues rather than direct references.
Recent exhibitions include DâStassi Art in London, CAN Art Fair, a group show with The Untitled Void in South Korea and an upcoming solo show in Paris.
His imagery circulates beyond galleries through collaborations with Harper Collective and the Art and Circularity program at Printemps, blurring lines between object, clothing and urban display.
The Soft Pulse Under the Gloss
Inagakiâs world may be cold, yet it is never empty. His figures twist, lean and gather as if listening for a warmth they know still exists.
The city presses against them. They press back. His surfaces reveal that emotion and survival are not opposites but different ways of holding the same pressure.
In this quiet, glossy language, a post human figure becomes strangely human again. The softness was always there. It only needed the right light to show.
Follow Yutaro Inagaki on Instagram and visit his upcoming exhibitions. Share this with someone who loves seeing cities through a different kind of body.
Official - Yutaro Inagaki
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