Yutaro Inagaki (b.1998) is a contemporary Japanese artist currently based in London. His creative roots lie in his teenage years spent immersed in urban exploration across Tokyo. Through the physical experience of crawling through the city’s underbelly, among sealed ruins, tangled pipes, and gaps in the concrete, he began to see the urban landscape not as a cold, inanimate vessel, but as a massive living organism in a constant state of flux. This visceral sense of the blurring boundaries between city and body remains the foundational pulse of his murals, paintings, and sculptures today.
Currently, Inagaki depicts life forms that either blend into or erode the urban environment. The figures in his work are often blurred, blacked out, or obscured by animal masks, rendered as anonymous entities stripped of regional or cultural signifiers. By dissolving the distinction between human and animal, these figures exist as liminal beings driven by raw instinct. This reflects his inquiry into how individual identity is swallowed by the urban system within the homogenous and collectivist society of Japan, reducing the self to a fragment of a primitive, sprawling herd.