The Light Within by Kaori Someya brings the inner light of Nihonga to Ippodo Gallery

Ippodo Gallery presents The Light Within, a solo exhibition by Japanese artist Kaori Someya, on view September 10 – October 17, 2026, marking the contemporary artist’s second working stay in New York. “The exhibition features more than a dozen of her latest urahaku Nihonga paintings, created in part during her ongoing artist’s residency in Brooklyn,” Ippodo Gallery shares in the show’s description.

For Tokyo-based Someya, light is not something that falls upon a figure—it comes from within. In the art exhibition, she turns this idea into a striking visual language, bringing together more than a dozen paintings shaped by themes of memory, impermanence, transformation and renewal. “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,” she notes in the press release.

At the exhibition's centre is a new folding screen titled Slow and Steady Progress, inspired by Ogata Kōrin’s celebrated painting Kōhaku Bai-zu (Red and White Plum Blossoms) c. 1714 – 16, a defining work of Japan’s Rimpa school. Someya reinterprets the historical reference through a urahaku technique, in which reflective platinum, gold and silver leaf are backed with translucent Mino washi paper.

Elsewhere, vibrantly patterned kimono function as carriers of memory and identity. Recurring motifs include patterns derived from the handwork of the painter’s late mother, which the artist describes as ‘life backgrounds’ or visual expressions of the inner worlds surrounding her characters. “Employing ijidōzuhō, 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,” the art gallery notes.

Someya prepares her own Nihonga pigments from rare minerals including azurite (gunjō) and malachite (rokushō), alongside dyes such as enji and indigo and materials derived from insect and oyster shells. These pigments are combined with nikawa, a traditional animal-glue medium, to create intensely layered surfaces and vivid colour.

“To her, the rare element of Nihonga is chowa no bi, the beauty in harmonising disparate mediums, materials and themes…The Light Within is the fullest expression of that transformation to date,” the contemporary art gallery mentions.