Fragile Like Life
My work was part of the Brent Biennial 2025, curated by Annie Jael Kwan. Installed in the Northwick Park Hospital garden, the piece created a silent, immersive spatial experience activated by air and movement. Porcelain footballs—air-inflated, fragile, and suspended within the environment—were dispersed across the garden: hanging from tree branches, wedged between limbs, resting on a rusty bench and picnic table, and scattered across the grass. The installation invited quiet reflection on fragility, play, and the delicate balance between nature and human presence.
Fragile Like Life – Yuki Nakamura
These fragile porcelain footballs, all at different stages of deflation, exist within the strenuous tension between the human world and the fragile earth we live in. Like globes, each ball represents a journey, fragile like life itself, destined to be dispersed throughout the world, traveling its own course, uniting viewers and speaking across cultures. Created by casting actual deflated and worn-out footballs in porcelain, these pieces embody evolving tactile effects on objects and a delicate porcelain skin that preserves dents, scars, and textures. Some were found abandoned on beaches, others softened and deformed through years of contact with countless hands and feet. While their original function is lost, their meaning as sculptural forms is expanded.
My work was supported by Westminster School of Arts and the London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust
AIR Ritual Artworks
Each breath is a new possibility of life. Inhalation and exhalation as cycles of existence. Air is also the catalytic substance of ignition; it represents the power of utterance; declaration, song, whistles, chants, spells, of mobilising ideas and knowledge, people and animals. The Intangible, invisible force that creates changes and circulation in culture, education, legal systems, religion and ideologies.
AIR Ritual forms part of the programme for Brent Biennial 2025. Titled “Bones, stones, and calling the four elements”, it seeks to invoke a communal spirit of gathering and imagining. Between June to October 2025 four ‘rituals’, WATER (22 June), EARTH (24 July – 1 August) FIRE (26 September – 12 October) and AIR (17 – 24 October) will unfold at four Brent sites – a public reservoir, a park, an old medical facility and a university campus. Located in the north and south of the borough — Harrow, Wembley and Kilburn — the ‘rituals’ will feature artists presenting workshops, talks, performance and exhibition.
‘Bones, stones, and calling the four elements‘ 3rd Edition of the Brent Biennial Curated By Annie Jael Kwan, a Metroland Cultures project.
