A close-up self-portrait of a young Japanese-Mongolian woman fills a horizontal canvas from her chest up. She turns in three-quarter profile to the left, her wide, brown eyes ringed with red looking past the frame. Her light, warm-toned skin is modeled in thick, rough strokes that leave ridges of paint. Her black hair is pulled back, with loose bangs brushing her forehead and cheek. She lifts a hand to her mouth, fingers soft but slightly tense as they grasp a thin pair of eyeglasses. A heavy red-brown sweater dissolves into dense, scumbled texture at the bottom edge. Behind her, a pale gray background swirls with scratched lines and dry-brushed marks, making her introspective gaze feel suspended in air. Arisa Yoshioka, a self-taught painter, was born in Ulaanbaatar and grew up between Mongolia and Japan. Now based in Tokyo, she often mines memories and personal emotion in works that balance tenderness with unease. In this painting, shown in GRIMM’s 2024 exhibition “Self-Portraits,” she turns the familiar genre inward to probe anxieties around beauty and self-scrutiny. The title, insisting that nothing here is cosmetic surgery, hints at pressures placed on young women’s faces—especially those racialized and read through narrow beauty standards. Thick impasto, raw eyelids, and the half-removed glasses suggest a body caught between seeing and being seen, vulnerability and performance. Yoshioka began painting only in 2021, yet has already developed a distinctive, grainy surface and muted palette that recall worn photographs or memory images. Across recent exhibitions and her first monograph “Idler,” she uses self-images like this one to weave together post-Soviet Mongolian childhood, life between languages, and the quiet resilience of looking back at oneself without softening the edges. Japanese sources often write her name as アリサ・ヨシオカ and 吉岡アリサ.
“This is not a cosmetic surgery, thank you” by Arisa Yoshioka (Japanese-Mongolian) - Oil on linen / 2023 - GRIMM Gallery (Amsterdam, Netherlands) #WomenInArt #ArisaYoshioka #Yoshioka #art #artText #BlueskyArt #GRIMMGallery #GRIMM #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #MongolianArtist #SelfPortrait
