Born in Gifu Prefecture, Japan, in 1986, Yokoyama graduated from Aichi University of the Arts in 2010 with a BFA in Oil Painting and completed her MFA in Oil Painting and Printmaking from the same university in 2012. Through painting, she seeks to liberate the semantic attributes that language assigns to objects through painting. In recent years, she has drawn attention with her series “Neon – Shape of your words,” in which she reproduces people’s handwriting with characters made from neon tubing. Her other works include the series “The first object,” which depicts objects that have reached the end of their lifespan and are ready to be scrapped; the series “Golden objects,” which uses the mimetic nature of painting to nullify the value of gold; and the charcoal drawings of “Memories of Love and Me,” which portray the day-to-day life of a girl and Love, her short-lived and selectively bred dog for over five years. Yokohama’s solo exhibitions at museums include “Aperto 10: YOKOYAMA Nami Memories of Love and Me” (21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2019) and “Artist in Museum AiM Vol. 11 YOKOYAMA Nami: forever” (The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, 2021). Her work has featured in exhibitions including “Reaching for the Real” (Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, 2014). “VOCA” (The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, 2015/2023), “Nissan Art Award” (recipient of the Audience Award; BankART Studio NYK, Yokohama, 2017), “What is Real? — Contemporary Artists — Living and Depicting” (touring exhibition: The Hiratsuka Museum of Art, Ashikaga Museum of Art, Takaoka Art Museum, Fukuyama Museum of Art, Niigata City Art Museum, Kurume City Art Museum, 2022–23), “Roppongi Crossing 2022: Coming & Going” (Mori Art Museum, 2022), and “Before/After”, an exhibition commemorating the completion of the renovation of the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (2023). Works of Yokoyama’s are included in the collections of the Mori Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, and the University Art Museum at Aichi University of the Arts. She is also featured in “Vitamin Txt: Words in Contemporary Art”, a book focused on artists who work with text; it is part of Phaidon’s “Vitamin” series, which introduces leading contemporary artists to the world, each installment focusing on a different medium or theme.