Kaori Someya: The Light Within at Ippodo Gallery

Ippodo Gallery's Tribeca space at 35 North Moore Street is showing Kaori Someya: The Light Within, the Tokyo-based Nihonga painter's first solo exhibition at the gallery. It closes on October 17, 2026, so this is the final weekend.

Someya was born in Shimane in 1977. She holds a B.A. in Japanese Nihonga painting and an M.A. in Cultural Properties from Tokyo University of the Arts, where she later worked as an adjunct instructor, research assistant and assistant professor. She has received several awards from the INTEN exhibition at museums across Japan, and her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Adachi Museum of Art, the Imai Art Museum and the Niimi Museum of Art.

The show brings together more than a dozen recent paintings made with urahaku, a thousand-year-old method in which gold, silver and platinum leaf is applied to the back of translucent Mino washi so that light seems to glow from within the picture. Her subjects are women in vividly patterned kimono, with expressions that sit between serenity and resignation. The paintings take up the pull between outside social pressure and the wish to hold on to one's own beliefs and identity. Someya describes the urahaku garments as an "Inner Light" that illuminates both the subject's strength and the space around her.

The folding screens anchor the show, with one inspired by Ogata Kōrin's Red and White Plum Blossoms (c. 1714–16). Among the works are Pictures of Seasonal Changes in Dress (2026), a pair of two-panel screens in gold leaf, silver leaf, mineral pigments and dye, and Slow and Steady Progress (2026), a four-panel screen in silver leaf and platinum powder. Other 2025–26 pieces include Return, Garden of New Growth, Blossom Evening, Reflected Landscape, Spring Day Procession, Blessed Rain, Autumn Echoes and Soaring Light, alongside Tagasode: Tailwind from 2017.

Patterns on the kimono draw on her late mother's handwork and recur as "life backgrounds," interior worlds made visible. Using ijidōzuhō, the classical device of showing several moments in one continuous scene, she gives grief and renewal a place in a single still image. Her paints are prepared from minerals such as azurite and malachite, enji and indigo dyes, and ground shells bound with nikawa glue. For her, the distinctive quality of Nihonga is chōwa no bi, the beauty of harmonizing different media, materials and themes.

Some works were made during her current residency in Brooklyn, her second extended stay in New York, which she describes as a new way of seeing.