BIOGRAPHY
Jeu. is an artistic practice developed by architect Hideaki Nishimura and artist Yumi Toyama, grounded in architecture, mathematics, painting and hand-executed construction.
Hideaki Nishimura is a first-class licensed architect in Japan, with academic and professional experience spanning architecture, urban design and branding in Italy and France. After being awarded a first-prize scholarship to Domus Academy in Milan through its international competition and completing his master’s degree there with distinction, he moved to Paris and deepened his expertise as an architect and branding consultant.
Alongside the functional and programmatic demands of architectural projects, his curiosity increasingly centred on the underlying conditions governing space—mathematical order, physical forces and structural logic. In his works, such as BALANCE | IMBALANCE and WATER CONCERTO, this pursuit comes into play, demonstrating how these principles operate in space. This trajectory led him to co-found Jeu., where architectural methodology is transposed into artistic form.
After studying oil painting and silverpoint drawing, Yumi Toyama built her career in Paris as a colourist and nail artist in the luxury fashion and beauty industries. She contributed to a diverse range of projects for VOGUE, CHANEL, DIOR and CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN—including campaigns, shoots, editorials and workshops—modulating colour and surface in response to image, body and object.
As her experience in fashion and beauty grew, however, she became less drawn to shaping the visual, symbolic and narrative codes of branding. Instead, she began studying mathematics independently and found in geometry a new foundation for her work, developing an approach in which colour and surface serve not as decoration but as formative elements. Now, as a co-founder of Jeu., she brings hand fabrication, surface treatment and colour theory into the construction of form in space.
The name Jeu. carries a twofold resonance. In French, jeu means “play”; within Jeu.’s context, the term refers not to entertainment, but to a mode of observation, reflection and interpretation that unfolds through rules, moves and their consequences. The word also suggests the operation of forces and elements, as well as a slight clearance within a structure—a margin that allows motion, relation and form to emerge.
Together, these two fields resolve into Jeu.’s creative logic: a game of spatial reasoning and manoeuvre, played with architectural precision, material sensitivity and meticulous craftsmanship.
Their distinct backgrounds converge in Architectonic Painting, the axis of their broader body of work, which spans spatial installations, animation, furniture, objects, branding and architectural projects and has been presented in exhibitions and publications in Japan and internationally.
