Born in Tokyo, Japan, Yuka Otani completed her bachelor’s decree (craft design) in Tama Art University in 2000. She later received her M.F.A. with honors from Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. Her outstanding performance has made her the winner of the Oriental Hotel Hiroshima Prize/Audience’s Prize (Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art) in 2013, and the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program in 2009. Her works are in the collections of the Museum of American Glass in Millville, New Jersey. Yuka Otani had numerous exhibitions across the United States, Europe and Asia, including joint exhibition ‘Whereabouts’ (2016, curated by Hyperopia Projects) at the glass museum GlazenHuis in lommel, Belgium, ‘BEST IF USED BY’ (2016) at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in Houston, Texas, ‘Quotidiaen’ (2014) at CelerySpace Gallery in Berkeley, California, and her solo exhibitions ‘Vitreous’ (2014) at Oriental Design Gallery in Hiroshima, Japan, ‘Study for Hojoki’ (2012) at Camel Project Space in Brooklyn, New York.

Yuka Otani’s creation is focused on the distinctness of a transparent material which the artist has studied meticulously. The material has a changeable characteristic and unstable to predictable processes and life cycle. In her art creation, Otani also demonstrated the changes in time and temperature, while exploring constancy and inconstancy, past and present as well as reality and representation through a creative fusion across different fields like art, design and science, using glass as a medium along with sugar in expressing a narrative art form.

For her art exhibition, Yuka Otani took inspiration from the 100-year history of the sugar industry, specifically Kio-A-Thau Sugar Refinery and Pier-2 Artist Center from 2015 to 2017. Yuka Otani’s silkscreen combining sugar and ink, entitled “Rediscovering Nostalgia”, incorporates the concept of agriculture into the artwork to symbolize honor, simplicity and sincerity. The artwork “Emergence” depicts the Kaohsiung Harbor and a vessel through a metaphor showing industrial prosperity and decline and social change. The video installation piece “Memories of Sugar Cane” shows the aburidashi printing techniques in the old days, described in words written on paper that recall true, poignant memories during those hard times. 

A sitting Buddha in meditation demonstrates peace and tranquility of the mind. The artwork is rendered using a special sugar coating that stimulates the senses, igniting the viewer’s interest. “Quiero Caramelos” (I want Candy) is a rollover gun work using lightbox. It pays tribute to the glass installation artist Silvia Levenson. The artwork depicts a world of illusion that portrays gun not only as a toy, but also as a weapon. Yuka Otani’s works involve the subject of philosophy and spirituality, rendered using common physical properties and characteristics of sugar and glass to express the fragility of life and the flow of impermanence.