Exhibition Details

Ippodo Gallery is pleased to present Kaori Someya: The Light Within, an exhibition by the Japanese artist which features more than a dozen of her latest urahaku Nihonga paintings, created in part during her ongoing artist’s residency in Brooklyn. The centrepiece of the Manhattan gallery exhibition is a folding screen inspired by a most celebrated masterwork of Japan’s Rimpa school, Ogata Korin’s Kohaku Bai-zu (Red and White Plum Blossoms, c. 1714–16). Someya’s contemporary portrait scenes are illuminated using a thousand-year-old technique of diffusing reflective platinum, gold and silver leaf decoration by backing them with translucent Mino washi paper.
“In my work, the urahaku garments serve as an ‘Inner Light’—a radiance that illuminates both the interior strength of the subject and the space around her,” says Someya.
 
Someya’s themes of impermanence, memory, transformation and the eternal shifting dance of light are expressed as changing seasons and unfixed shadows. Vibrantly patterned kimonos tell hidden stories of the characters. Kimono patterns derived from her late mother’s handwork recur as depictions of 'life backgrounds'—interior worlds made visible. Employing ijidozuho, the classical Japanese technique of rendering multiple moments within a single continuous scene, she imbues intense emotion—grief and renewal—into sweeping still images.
Her materials are ancient but the concerns are urgently contemporary. Nihonga today is more expansive than ever before: new pigments have emerged and deviating from traditional motifs need no longer exclude a work from the category altogether. Someya classically prepares the Nihonga paints from rare azurite (gunjo) and malachite (rokusho), among many other precious and rare minerals, as well as enji and indigo dyes, and the shells of insects and oysters combined with Nikawa glue to achieve brilliantly layered and vivid colours. To her, the rare element of Nihonga is chowa no bi, the beauty in harmonising disparate mediums, materials and themes.
Someya’s Brooklyn residency—her second extended working stay in New York—broadens the inspiration the artist draws from the city that she describes as a new way of seeing. The Light Within is the fullest expression of that transformation to date.