Amia Yokoyama

Amia Yokoyama’s world is one of shimmering thresholds — between the visible and invisible, between object and body, between history and speculation. Born in Illinois and based in Los Angeles, Yokoyama is a multimedia artist and educator whose practice traverses experimental animation, sculpture, and installation. Her signature figure, the slime girl, recurs across media as an avatar of fluid identity: mythic and material, erotic and abject, never quite settling into containment. In Grotto, her newest sculpture for Fable & Form, Yokoyama invites viewers into a personal cosmology — one where the monstrous is embraced with gentleness, and the ornamental is redefined as a mode of power.

"They aren’t quite a girl or human, but hover somewhere in the in-between: thing, virus, person, monster, phantasmic desire... a body without an endpoint."

Yokoyama’s practice is defined by its movement across dimensions. Clay, her oldest medium, demands engagement with the elemental — air, earth, fire, water — while holograms and animation allow her to toy with the limits of space and time. She likens her creative rhythm to the life cycle of a newt: emerging from an aqueous realm of the immaterial, grounding in sculptural form, then returning to fluidity through digital play. Each material she uses — porcelain especially — is chosen not just for its feel or form, but for its history, its metaphor, its ability to speak about bodies and boundaries.

"Porcelain has been used to describe flesh. It’s fragile, perfect, possessable. But I turn it into something leaking, unfixed — an embodied contradiction."

Grotto is a 2024 porcelain sculpture that rests somewhere between shrine and biome, mythology and objecthood. At its center, Yokoyama’s slime girl lounges within a luminous earthen cradle — her form amorphous, quietly alert, draped in slick, melting folds. Around her, dozens of outstretched ceramic hands emerge like sprouting fungi, each offering tiny porcelain vessels — a constellation of yearning, gift, and devotion. Branch-like lattices twist around the structure, suggesting a forest-made reliquary or protective scaffold. In Grotto, Yokoyama not only expands her slime girl mythology, but crafts a microcosm of compassion for the “othered” body, elevating the ornamental into the sacred.

Following Fable & Form, Yokoyama continues to explore illusion, material transformation, and the spectral — those forms that are simultaneously “there” and “not there.” Her recent exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch, Craft Contemporary, and Sebastian Gladstone have spotlighted her distinctive voice across animation and ceramics. As her slime girl universe expands, so too does her investigation into objects that flicker, absorb, and exist in plural forms — not portraits, but living ecosystems.

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