Biography
Taro Yakumo
Contemporary Artist / Tokyo, Japan
A life guided by instinct. From a childhood surrounded by paintings, to musical activities, and travels around the world, this is the story of how Taro Yakumo stepped into the world of art.
Early Years
Born to an art dealer father and a jeweler mother, Taro Yakumo grew up in an environment where art was always present. His home was filled with stacked paintings from his father's business, and from an early age he attended oil painting classes, working from still lifes of flowers and everyday objects. A few of these early works still remain. The walls of the house were covered in his drawings.
As a child, he had few friends nearby and spent much of his time alone. While weekly manga magazines like Shonen Jump were enormously popular among his peers, he showed little interest. Instead, he was drawn to art books featuring Picasso and Taro Okamoto, and to photography collections of railways and landscapes.
First Impressions
Although exposed early to his father's business, which dealt primarily in Showa-era Nihonga, these works failed to captivate him. He found them dull and uninspiring. This early impression of art as something static and inaccessible would go on to shape his relationship with it for years to come.
By the later years of elementary school, portable music players like the Walkman had become part of daily life. It was during this time that a borrowed Beatles album left a profound impact, moving him to tears. This was his first experience of art as something visceral and alive.
Entering junior high school during Japan's band boom, he threw himself into playing instruments and began dreaming of a career as a musician. His interest in visual art faded, though album cover design remained a quiet thread connecting him to the visual world.
Music and a New Direction
Through high school, he immersed himself in Western music, deepened his involvement in band life, and began seriously considering an international music career. Drawn to global culture and resistant to the conformity of group life in Japan, he looked outward. But shifts in the music industry, changes in the media landscape, and a gradual loss of passion brought him to a standstill.
The Encounter with Contemporary Art
Around the early 2000s, contemporary art began to take hold in Japan. The art scene was shifting from a Nihonga-centric perspective toward a more globalized outlook. During this period, he began assisting his father at international art fairs and auctions across Asia. What he encountered there was unlike anything from his childhood: work that was free, bold in color, grand in scale, and unmistakably part of a global cultural conversation.
The experience overturned everything he had previously understood about art. At a moment when he was struggling with the frustration of no longer being able to express himself as a musician, these encounters with contemporary art hit with unexpected force.
Seoul and the Art World
Drawn in particular to Korea, a country he had been visiting regularly, he made the decision to study abroad there in 2009. While attending university in Seoul, he immersed himself in the Korean contemporary art scene, visiting galleries, art fairs, and auctions, and gaining firsthand insight into how the art world actually operates.
Korean contemporary art at the time stood out for its scale and energy, and felt far more exciting than what was happening in Japan. As his relationships with art professionals deepened and his understanding of the market grew, he began to see a path: making art his life's work.
Practice and Philosophy
After relocating his base to Tokyo, he engaged in exhibition planning, curation, and participation in art fairs, before fully dedicating himself to painting. He has since participated in international art fairs and completed an artist residency in New York.
He has since presented his work at major galleries both in Japan and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Saitama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, as well as exhibitions at Artglorieux Gallery within GINZA SIX and Whitestone Gallery.
In addition, he has exhibited at numerous international art fairs across Asia and the United States, such as Art Fair Tokyo, KIAF (Seoul), One Art Taipei (Taipei), and Aqua Art Miami. His activities have also been recognized in the context of public and cultural engagement, including official recognition from the Itabashi Cultural and International Exchange Foundation.
His practice continues to evolve, shaped by memory, culture, and instinct. Rooted in the nostalgic textures of a rapidly changing society, his work searches for the dualities that lie beneath familiar surfaces, operating under a single guiding belief: Art is Entertainment.
Art is Entertainment.
Solo Exhibition - Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 2024
Solo Exhibition - Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, 2024
GINZA SIX Window Display, 2024