Yasuyo Maruyama, “Fragments of Identity”

by John Zotos

Ro2 Gallery, Dallas, Texas

Continuing through May 17, 2025

Yasuyo Maruyama, “Ai 2,” 2021, oil on panel, 16 x 16 x 2”. All images courtesy of the artist and Ro2 Art, Dallas.

“Fragments of Identity” provides a selection of Yasuyo Maruyama’s paintings executed between 2020 and 2025.  As such, they summarize her grappling with portraiture over those five years, a period bookended by a devastating pandemic and the dawn of an authoritarian regime in Washington. 

Yasuyo Maruyama, “Misaki 2,” 2020, oil on wood panel, 16 x 16 x 2”.

In good interpretive fashion, the notion of “identity” is as full of currently unresolvable political significance as it is suggestive of the fact that parts and fragments ultimately comprise a unified whole. This is reflected in the totality of each composite image that Maruyama assembles from numerous photographs of her subjects, resulting in a hyper-realistic representation rooted in the distillation of her source material. The artist’s aesthetic celebrates pluralism genuinely, over and above the kind of one-dimensional depiction common to both politics and popular culture. 

Maruyama’s paintings are executed in painstaking detail with traditional Japanese artisanal tools. She overlays pigment and varnish in many layers in order to achieve the remarkable flesh tones and hues that are her trademark signifiers. These technical abilities are brought to bear on themes that wrestle with the ambiguity between human consciousness and artificial intelligence.  The artist’s iconography is informed by anime and manga, references to a technologically augmented world infused with virtual reality — a world heading our way fast. 

Yasuyo Maruyama, “Sakiko 3,” 2021, oil on wood panel, 47 x 47”.

The images are intensely vibrant and visually arresting. Each is an extreme close-up of head and neck, where the top of the image crops the head and leads the eye in with the subject’s eyes. Usually featured against a monochromatic background, the tight visual focus compresses the subject within a square frame format that always takes us straight to the sitter’s eyes. It is here that the artist spends most of her time rendering volume and depth, in contrast to the otherwise flat surfaces and clean lines that define the other facial features. This is clearly evident in “Natsuki 3,” where, in an image featuring flesh tones, a black background, and pink lips, the otherworldly eyes sparkle like emeralds. They float as if surrounded by a play of reflections that issues from somewhere beyond the frame, making the subject feel like an artificial being, a cyborg, beyond the merely human. 

“Karin” is the rare exception. Here the eyes seem to suggest something beyond the frame of the image. Upon close inspection they reveal a street scene, a link to a social reality that the artist hints does actually exist beyond her usual visual puzzles. The eyes are still the most important thematic device in that they get beyond just representing individuation within the theme of identity.

Yasuyo Maruyama, “Chiemi,” 2021, oil on wood panel, 47 x 47”.

Cinematic precedents suggest that the eyes signify the artificial aspect of AI, as depicted in the “Ghost in the Shell” films or by the replicants in Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner.” More recent examples in the genre, such as the androids known as ‘hosts’ in the “Westworld” series, or the AI character in Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina,” conceal the nature of the machines by opting for a naturalistic depiction of the eyes. With Maruyama, if the eyes are too real she loses what elevates the nature of her sitter’s portraits in the first place. By intertwining both ends of the spectrum, she aspires toward redefining beauty itself, and therefore, reclaiming truth during an era intent on distorting it.

John Zotos is an art critic and essayist based in Dallas.