Yuya Saito

Saito was born in Japan and is currently based in New York. Deeply influenced by skateboard culture and street culture since childhood, he creates work that explores the relationship between urban city and human being.

Rather than using conventional materials such as canvas or panels, Saito builds his visual world around the ramp—a semicircular structure used in skateboarding—as his primary motif.  In his practice, he incorporates bentwood, a traditional woodworking technique often used in furniture making, combining this with street aesthetics. By merging elements that seemingly have no direct connection—craft-based tradition and urban subculture—he seeks to develop a new visual language for reinterpreting the contemporary city.

Saito proposes a unique visual language called “flow-chitecture,” through which he reinterprets the ramp—an iconic structure within skateboard culture—as a site of democratic potential. By reframing the ramp from both artistic and architectural perspectives, he offers a critical approach to the institutionalized structures of contemporary urban space.

While ramps are generally perceived as mere tools for skaters to ride on, Saito identifies them as architectural structures of substantial scale that resist hierarchical symbolism. They lack the "height" typically associated with authority, and instead function as devices for exploring freedom through the skater’s repeated act of “riding.”

The repetitive motion embedded in the ramp echoes questions raised by Minimalism—such as the “unitization of form” and the “repetition of space”—but relocates these inquiries outside the confines of the gallery or museum. In doing so, Saito positions the ramp as perhaps the first structure to express these concerns through an external, urban object rather than an art object alone.

Saito seeks to redefine the ramp as an open, urban sculpture—a structure that generates flows of human movement and interaction. In this, he enacts his visual language of “flow-chitecture.”

By conceptualizing the ramp—long discussed outside of art contexts—and presenting it within institutional spaces such as museums and galleries, Saito does not merely submit to or oppose the system. Instead, he introduces a third approach: a reweaving of structures. This gesture reveals the ramp’s inherently democratic philosophy, and through this practice, he envisions a new kind of “ramp” as a passage—one that opens up fresh ways to re-question institutional frameworks themselves.

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