Kaori Someya: The Light Within
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Overview
Exhibition opens Thursday, September 10, 2026
- Opening Reception at 35 N Moore Street, TriBeCa: September 10, 2026, 5–8 PM
- Private viewing by appointment only.
NEW YORK, NY – Ippodo Gallery is pleased to present Kaori Someya: The Light Within, the Nihonga painter’s debut solo exhibition at Ippodo Gallery in TriBeCa, New York from September 10 to October 17, 2026. Someya’s paintings apply the thousand-year-old technique of urahaku, or the backing of transparent washi paper with gold and platinum leaf, instilling her paintings with an inner radiance. Someya uses the traditional medium of Nihonga as a way to explore the complex existence of women in contemporary Japanese society, depicting female figures in vibrantly patterned traditional kimono, their expressions caught between serenity and resignation. In doing so, Someya works to explore the tension women face between external societal pressures and the internal desire to preserve one’s beliefs and identity. The artist will visit New York for an opening reception on September 10 from 5–8PM.
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Press Release
“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 centerpiece of the Manhattan gallery exhibition is a folding screen inspired by a most celebrated masterwork of Japan’s Rimpa school, 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.
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 (gunjō) and malachite (rokushō) among many others 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 colors. To her, the rare element of Nihonga is chowa no bi, the beauty in harmonizing 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. Light Within is the fullest expression of that transformation to date.
Kaori Someya (b. 1977) is a Shimane-born Japanese painter based in Tokyo. She holds an M.A. in Cultural Properties and a B.A. in Japanese Nihonga painting from Tokyo University of the Arts, where she subsequently served as Adjunct Instructor, Research Assistant, and Assistant Professor. Her work has been recognized with multiple awards from the public exhibition INTEN at museums across Japan. Her paintings are held in the permanent collections of the Adachi Museum of Art, Imai Art Museum, and Niimi Museum of Art, Japan.
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Director's Letter
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.
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Artist Statement
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.
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