Yukimasa Ida

Yukimasa Ida was born in 1990 in Japan; sources vary on whether his hometown is Tottori or Kanagawa Prefecture. He earned a master's degree in oil painting at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2019, according to gallery biographies, though at least one market database instead lists Tama Art University as his school. His practice centers on thickly worked, large-scale oil portraits built around the concept of ichi-go ichi-e, treasuring an encounter that will never happen again in the same way.

His public profile rose quickly. In 2016 he took part in the VOCA Exhibition and won the Special Jury Award, selected by sculptor Kohei Nawa, at the CAF Award established by the Contemporary Art Foundation. He also became the youngest artist to participate in a charity auction organized by the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, though the exact year is not confirmed in available sources. He held early solo exhibitions in Japan, including Portraits in Tokyo in 2019, then joined Mariane Ibrahim, debuting with the gallery in Chicago with Here and Now in 2021. Villepin has shown his work in Asia since at least 2024, including Day Zero in Hong Kong, alongside his continuing representation by Mariane Ibrahim. He lives and works in Tokyo and continues to exhibit actively into 2026.

Coverage in gallery texts and art-press features consistently frames Ida's paintings as an attempt to fix a single fleeting encounter in thick, worked oil paint, an idea he ties explicitly to the concept of ichi-go ichi-e. Writers on his 2021 Chicago debut with Mariane Ibrahim have pointed to the physical density of his surfaces and his use of color to heighten a sense of psychological immediacy in each sitter. No verbatim, attributable critical quote could be confirmed from the available sources, so none is reproduced here.

Ida's clearest documented auction result is an oil painting reported to have sold for JPY 55,000,000 (approximately USD 409,000) at SBI Art Auction, which Artnet described as a new record for the artist. The report does not disclose the painting's title or the exact sale date. Other market listings reference lower price points for his work, but without title, house, or date detail sufficient to verify or rank them. Taken together, the record points to real but still thinly and unevenly documented auction demand for a young, actively exhibiting artist.

Ida is a young, living artist whose gallery program and awards have expanded rapidly since 2016, but whose public auction history remains comparatively thin, anchored mainly by a single well-documented result near USD 409,000 at SBI Art Auction. No catalogue raisonne exists, so provenance and authentication run through his galleries, Mariane Ibrahim and Villepin, and his studio. Collectors should also note that no permanent museum collection holding his work has been confirmed to date. His institutional relationships documented so far, including K11 Art Foundation and K11 MUSEA in Hong Kong, are exhibition venues rather than confirmed acquisitions.