Mayuka Yamamoto (b.1964, Okayama, Japan) is widely recognized as one of Japan’s leading second-generation contemporary artist. She studied print and oil painting at the Musashino Art University where she received her Masters degree in 1990. In 1998-1999, Yamamoto studied in London under the Japanese Government Overseas Study Program for Artists. Since 1992, she has exhibited extensively in solo and group shows in Japan and internationally. Yamamoto is known for her oil paintings portraying children in animal suits or possessing animal features, as a way to reveal their inner world. Like a protective armor in response to their emotions and psychological state, they seem to instinctively hide behind a second skin in the form of animal costumes or some other defensive physical animalistic features. The subtle tension portrayed in Yamamoto’s works becomes a powerful expression of the inner psyche stemming from childhood fears, that has been the central focus of Yamamoto’s works since her pregnancy and becoming a mother when she began to reflect on her own childhood and explored the ideas of natural instinct, parenthood and the anxieties related to growing up. A boy in an animal suit, and sometimes growing animal features, became Yamamoto’s way of representing the physical and psychological changes experienced by the child. Cloaked in the protective skin of the animal suit, or armed with defensive animal features such as deer antlers, the child stares out at the audience, who might connect emotionally, or even find themselves within the depths of the pensive eyes of the child in Yamamoto’s works.