Yoriko Seto: "Spuren"

Until February 1, 2026, the Künstler:innenhaus Bremen will present the final presentation “Spuren” (Traces) by Yoriko Seto, the 2025 Bremen studio scholarship holder. Born in Japan in 1975, Seto completed her studies in fine arts in 2024 as a master student of Heike Kati Barath at the HfK Bremen and works with drawing, animation, artist's books, and objects. In her exhibition, Seto brings together several works from the past year in which she interweaves everyday experiences with memories through drawing, reflecting on her family, her upbringing in Japan, and her growing older in Germany. These traces come together to form a mosaic of experiences, memories, and reflections on life and its end.

Drawing is the basis of Seto's artistic practice. Since 2017, she has been keeping regular drawing diaries to record her personal experiences. By capturing seemingly banal things—casual scenes, thoughts, observations—in her drawings, Seto offers a quiet form of resistance to forgetting.

Seto not only draws her current thoughts and experiences, but also uses drawing as a form of remembrance: initially abstract lines give rise to fragments of memories of her friend and aunt who died last year. Seto weaves these fragments of memory into meter-long charcoal drawings in a creative process lasting several months. Seto is just as interested in the traces of memory as she is in the traces of charcoal on the painting surface.

The work “uni” (2025), an oversized Japanese school uniform (seifuku) sewn from paper and accompanied by an animated film, also arose from the combination of traces of memory and everyday observations. For this work, Seto transferred pigment spots from her skin and that of her friends onto large-format paper and used them to make the uniform. Seto enlarged the skin spots, which are actually only a few millimeters in size, to almost one meter in her drawings.

She then crumples these drawings and tries to rub the stains away by rubbing the paper together—similar to how she and her friends treat the stains on their skin with bleaching creams and lasers. Seto transferred this symbolic struggle with social beauty standards and questions of social conformity and belonging into an animated film that accompanies the uniform. The film features animated drawings of a homogeneous group of figures.

A single figure is pulled out by large hands and then dabbed with a cream. The fingers of the oversized hands become entangled with the figure. Seto links her reflections on the traces of her aging with memories of the school uniform she wore as a young girl in Japan.In Japan, seifuku are based on the design of military and naval uniforms from the Meiji era and can be seen as a reflection of society's demands for uniformity and flawlessness. Seto's individual perspectives and personal experiences are condensed in her artistic practice into traces of universal feelings.

Curated by Clara Kramer