YUJI MIZUTA – SIMULACRUM / BREATH OF HAZE

On Thursday, November 13, 2025, Amy-d Arte Spazio, located in the heart of Milan’s Brera District, presents Simulacrum – Breath of Haze, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Japanese artist Yuji Mizuta (born in Shizuoka, 1976; lives and works in Tokyo). The exhibition is curated by Raffaella Nobili, who also serves as co-director of the gallery alongside Anna d’Ambrosio.

This new economArt project continues the Milanese gallery’s exploration of the interrelations between body, matter, and technology, while probing the boundaries of contemporary Japanese performance art. In Simulacrum – Breath of Haze, Mizuta transforms physical experience into a nostalgic simulacrum, preserving an ethereal trace of life in perpetual transformation.

Rarely seen in Europe, Mizuta employs a wide range of techniques – drawing, painting, collage, weaving, dyeing, embroidery, printmaking, and video – to create a hybrid and sensory language. His meticulously constructed compositions unfold on fabric and paper as visual translations of underlying narratives. He has produced several public artworks and held solo exhibitions in Japan and abroad, including in Tokyo, Copenhagen, and Singapore. In recent years, his practice has expanded to experimental media such as video and dialogic performance.

The exhibition encompasses painting, drawing, photography, sound, and site-specific installations. Among the works on view: Hakama, Haori, Kokoro / Inside (from the cycle Demolition_Purification_Love_Magic, 2022), silk-screen print and hand embroidery on fabric; the video installation Necromancy (2022); the videos Mie / My Face Up to Age 48 (2025) and Simulacrum_Sensuous (2025); the installation Utsuwa (seven monitors with silk screen prints, embroidery, and hand stitching on cottons from the series Talisman, 2019); and textile-based works such as Serpentine (2025), Fudoki (2025), The Changeling (2025), and Ode to a Nightingale (2025), handwoven silk-screen prints with frames.

“It emerges in the haze, takes shape, and then returns to it. Contours arise, solidify, and dissolve, while existence constantly renews itself in a state of continuous fluctuation,” writes the artist.
“The sensation of oboroge – hazy, vague – is, for me, a deeply impressionistic visual image.”

With Simulacrum, Mizuta interlaces the themes of image, semblance, phantom, and illusion into an interdisciplinary reflection on space, time, and existence. His practice unfolds as a metaphysical inquiry into being and the individual’s ability to connect – in a Jungian sense – to a collective unconscious that transcends cultural boundaries. The artist explores the fluid nature of memory, presenting fragments of reality reinterpreted as simulacra in a continuous dialogue between imagination and perception.

This vision resonates with the Japanese belief in Yaoyorozu no Kami – the divinity that dwells within all things: mountains, rivers, wind, stones, fire, rice, and ancestors – an expression of a sensitivity that perceives the sacred within nature, an archetype of humanity’s innate reverence for the natural world.

Within this poetic framework intertwine fetishism, deep affection, joy, pain, desire, and queerness — expressed with raw vulnerability or gentle subtlety. These emotions emerge like the drifting trail of incense, evoking corporeal memories and present sensations with delicate intensity. Confronted with these fragments, the viewer may awaken personal recollections in a process of continual rewriting of memory, as the boundaries between past and present dissolve.

Through visual, sonic, and spatial experiences, Simulacrum – Breath of Haze investigates the uncertainty, distortion, and transformation of memory, delineating a coherent and mature trajectory that reflects the artist’s evolution. The works on display compose a repertoire of images and allegories that are both distinctive in style and open to new layers of meaning.

The exhibition is accompanied by Raffaella Nobili’s critical essay SIMULACRUM – Guardian of Impermanence, produced in strategic partnership with Amy-d Arte Spazio.

In line with the gallery’s mission – to deconstruct prejudices and promote new perspectives through contemporary art – the economArt project critically reflects on the relationships between body, society, environment, and technology, offering an interpretation of human experience poised between life and death, identity and metamorphosis. Understanding Mizuta’s poetics requires a historical and anthropological approach to Japanese culture – its tensions between tradition and revolution and its dialogue with Western art – in which the political and social spirit of an era reemerges, always veiled, through artistic practice.

Here, the simulacrum is understood as a process of transformation of reality – an expression of the tension between the artificial and the natural, and a sign of the progressive hegemony of technology over nature. This concept finds theoretical grounding in Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the precession of simulacra (1979), articulated in three orders – counterfeit, mass production, and simulation – culminating in the current postmodern condition.

In both art and science, the simulacrum – from Lucretius’ De rerum natura onward – has provoked unease for its ambiguous, almost sacrilegious nature: it is not a copy, but a troubling resemblance. Its potency lies in its ability to generate estranging, sometimes psychopathic effects, whereas “normal” artworks simply invite admiration, sale, or collection. From Duchamp to Manzoni, Koons, Orlan, and Cattelan, many artists have chosen fiction as a critical practice. Within this genealogy, Yuji Mizuta’s research stands as a poetic and ritual meditation on the fragility of reality and on the necessity of the simulacrum as guardian of impermanence.