Kaori Someya: The Light Within

“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.”

NEW YORK, NY – Ippodo Gallery is pleased to present Kaori Someya: The Light Within, an exhibition of new works, from September 10 to October 17, 2026. The show opens in attendance of the artist visiting from Tokyo on Thursday, September 10 from 5–8PM. 

The exhibition features more than a dozen of her latest urahaku Nihonga paintings, created in part during her ongoing artist’s residency in Brooklyn. The centerpieces of the Manhattan gallery exhibition are two folding screens; inspired by the most celebrated masterworks of Japan’s Rimpa school, one closely recreates the scene of Tawaraya Sōtatsu's Wind God Fujin and Thunder God Raijin (c. 1639), while another references Ogata Kōrin'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.

Someya’s themes of impermanence, memory, transformation, and the eternal shifting dance of light are expressed as changing seasons and unfixed shadows. Vibrantly patterned kimono 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 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.

Where the Light Within Resides

June 2026, Shoko Aono

The women Kaori Someya paints do not easily reveal themselves. Eyes cast downward, or gazing into the distance, they wear expressions that are mysterious and ethereal — suspended somewhere between dream and waking. Yet when one's gaze drifts to the patterns adorning their kimonos, emotion surfaces at once. Flowers bloom in vivid abundance, a crisp wind moves through cool green bamboo, and cheerful goldfish drift through still water. In Someya’s paintings, the patterns on the kimonos are not mere decoration. It is a landscape of feeling — a jōkei, a scenery of the heart. Nature does not simply exist in the outside world; it is the interior world itself, giving voice to Someya’s subjects. 

And then, we must speak of light.

The technique Someya employs, known as urahaku, involves pressing gold or platinum leaf against the reverse side of Japanese washi paper. From the front, neither gold nor platinum is visible. However, soft light seeps through the mineral pigments from the other side of the washi paper. It is not light reflecting off the surface, but rather light that gradually emerges from deep within, from the other side. Like sunlight filtering through the trees, this light is both fleeting and gentle. The nature of this light resembles the very state of mind she depicts. Sorrow, dreams, conflict, memory, passion — these are never shown directly. They glow quietly beneath the many layers of everyday life. Someya's paintings illuminate each of those hidden folds, one by one, through light. 

Someya's act of creation itself — pressing metal leaf against the back of fragile washi, then layering mineral pigments ground from the earth — reflects, perhaps, the very nature of her resolve: resilient, and unwavering. May you receive the light that emerges from her paintings — the Light Within.

My practice begins with women who speak on my behalf. They are not portraits, but storytellers who carry memory, silence, emotion, and the quiet pressures of living.

At the center of my work is the question of how to live with what cannot be fully controlled. The women in my paintings carry this uncertainty, and the materials I use also embody it. For me, painting is not a way to overcome fragility, but a way to stay with it, allowing it to transform into a quiet, soft resilience.

 I use traditional Japanese materials because they allow me to connect with nature through the act of painting. Mineral pigments, washi, ink, and metal leaf respond to humidity, gravity, absorption, and time. They separate, settle, reflect, and change in ways I cannot fully control. I guide the process, but I do not complete the image alone. In the end, nature paints the picture.

Metal leaf and urahaku create a soft reflected light that extends the painting beyond its visible surface. For me, yohaku is not only empty space within the composition. It is an invisible, experiential margin that emerges between the work and the viewer. Through this margin, the painting becomes not only something to look at, but something to encounter quietly and contemplatively.