Ryuki Yamamoto

Ryuki Yamamoto was born in 1976 in Mie Prefecture, Japan. He studied at Tokyo Zokei University in Tokyo, earning a bachelor's degree; gallery sources disagree on whether he graduated in 2001 or 2011, a discrepancy that has not been resolved in available research.

He held his first solo exhibition in 2002 at Gallery ES in Tokyo, followed by further solo shows there in 2003. His practice, built from intricately layered, often humorous, photorealistic self-portraiture, gained wider attention with two solo exhibitions at Mizuma Action in Tokyo in 2006, 1000 Self-Portraits and Shi Shin Kei, Super privatism. In 2005 he received the Outstanding Award at the 8th Taro Okamoto Memorial Award for Contemporary Art, held at the Taro Okamoto Museum of Art in Kawasaki.

In 2011 he received a grant from the Pola Art Foundation to take up a residency in Beijing, where he lived and worked through 2012. He later undertook a residency in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, around 2014 to 2015. He continued to show regularly at Mizuma Art Gallery in Tokyo, with solo exhibitions in 2014 and 2020, and a further solo exhibition running from December 2025 to January 2026. In 2026 a work by Yamamoto was presented by Mizuma at Art Basel Hong Kong. He currently lives and works in Tokyo, and no obituary, death notice, or memorial exhibition has been found in gallery, museum, or auction sources as of this writing.

Institutional recognition for Yamamoto has come mainly through award juries and group exhibition selection rather than through a large body of published art criticism. The Outstanding Award at the 2005 Taro Okamoto Memorial Award for Contemporary Art placed him within a recognized track for emerging Japanese artists, and his work is held in a small number of institutional and private collection contexts, including an entry in the San Antonio Museum of Art's collection database. Gallery texts consistently describe his work in terms of density and scale, characterizing his self-portraits as multiply detailed and his compositions as overwhelming. No verifiable, exactly quotable assessment from a named critic in a major outlet has been located to date.

Yamamoto's documented auction history is limited and imprecise in public sources. Market databases report a realized price up to approximately USD 202,868 for a painting, though the specific lot, auction house, and sale date could not be independently confirmed. The one auction result with a confirmed house and price is a Christie's Hong Kong lot in an Asian Contemporary Art day sale that realized HKD 740,000 against an estimate of HKD 600,000 to 800,000; the exact sale date and work title were not confirmed in research. His primary market runs through his two representing galleries, Mizuma Art Gallery in Tokyo and Mizuma Gallery in Singapore, with recent visibility extended by his 2026 Art Basel Hong Kong presentation.

Yamamoto's market sits closer to the emerging end of the spectrum than to an established secondary market: auction appearances are limited and imprecisely documented in public sources, with only one confirmed sale price, a Christie's Hong Kong lot at HKD 740,000, alongside an unconfirmed higher ceiling figure reported by market databases. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and authenticity checks should run through his representing galleries in Tokyo and Singapore rather than through a published archive. His growing institutional and fair presence, including his 2026 Art Basel Hong Kong showing, is a signal to watch, but collectors should treat any single auction result as a thin, uncertain data point given how few public sales exist and how imprecisely they are documented.