Yuka Kashihara was born in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan in 1980. She graduated from the Department of Japanese Painting, Musashino Art University in 2006, and the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig in 2013.



Within the world of her artworks, scenes from both reality and the spaces of the internal imagination are gently interwoven. Against this backdrop, having left Japan and moved to Germany where she continued developing her practice, Kashihara acquired an interest in the ‘distance’ between the internal and the external.



This becomes expressed symbolically as an introspective speculation in the forms of the motifs of caves, holes, mountains and lakes which she repeatedly takes up within her work, and through this process of sublimation it is as though the original energies which lie dormant within the great Earth have become awakened. She uses oil paint applied in a thinly diffuse manner similar to that of Japanese nihonga painting, and by applying it in numerous layers she is able to create a unique depth of color.



She has won the "Honourable Mention Award" and "Ohara Museum of Art Award" in VOCA 2013; her exhibitions include: "Borrowed Scenery" (Bauhaus Dessau, 2008), "First Island - Last Mountain" (Ohara Museum of Art, 2016), "1:1" (POLA MUSEUM ANNEX, 2021), "Lemon" (Dai-ichi Life Hibiya Head Office, 2021), etc.