Urahaku (Reverse-Side Gold Leaf) and “The Light Within”

From September 10 through October 17, 2026, Ippodo Gallery in Tribeca, New York, presents The Light Within, a solo exhibition of new works by Japanese painter Kaori Someya. Her first solo presentation with Ippodo Gallery, it is also her second solo exhibition in New York, following a/synchronous at Sato Sakura Gallery in 2021, which marked Someya’s first solo exhibition outside Japan.

The exhibition brings together a dozen new works, several of which were created during the artist’s stay in Brooklyn from August through September 2026. This was Someya’s first extended period of living and working in New York, and Ippodo Gallery has described the experience as opening up “new ways of seeing” for the artist—perspectives that find their clearest articulation to date in this body of work.

Yet to translate The Light Within simply as “inner light” is not quite enough to reach the heart of the exhibition. The light Someya seeks to paint is not an external illumination cast upon a woman to enhance the beauty of her appearance. It comes, rather, from within: from those dimensions of human existence that ordinarily remain invisible to others—will, memory, pain, endurance, desire, hope, and the determination to remain oneself. In Someya’s paintings, these intangible forces seem to gather beneath the visible surface and quietly radiate outward.

In this sense, the exhibition’s title gives a remarkably precise expression to a concern Someya has pursued for years. Central to her practice is the technique of urahaku, or reverse-side metal leaf. Rather than applying metallic leaf to the front of the painting, Someya places gold, silver, or platinum leaf behind translucent Japanese paper, allowing its reflected light to pass through the paper and layers of mineral pigment before reaching the viewer. The metal itself is withheld from direct sight. Filtered through the membrane of the paper, its brilliance is subdued and transformed into something softer, more diffused, and inwardly resonant. Ippodo Gallery describes the luminosity produced through urahaku as an “Inner Light,” one that evokes the internal strength of the figure while subtly illuminating the space around her. It is here that Someya’s technique and her spiritual concerns converge with particular force. For her, the “reverse” is not simply the physical back of a painted surface. If the front belongs to the realm of what can be seen, then the reverse might be understood as the realm of interiority.

What lies behind the face one presents to society; the body beneath an opulent kimono; and, deeper still, the emotions beneath the body. Memories for which there are no words. The lingering presence of what has been lost. A sense of self that may waver but does not entirely disappear. Someya’s women frequently lower their eyes or direct their gaze somewhere beyond the viewer. Their expressions reveal little, yet in striking contrast to this reticence, the flora, fauna, and seasonal motifs that proliferate across their kimonos are extraordinarily eloquent. Ippodo Gallery’s exhibition text likewise approaches these patterns not as mere ornament, but as landscapes of the inner self—a visual language through which emotions otherwise held in silence are allowed to surface.

The women in Someya’s paintings might therefore be understood less as portraits than as vessels of interior life. The artist has stated that she does not portray particular individuals, but women in a more universal sense. Yet when her work is considered across the years, it becomes difficult not to perceive something of Someya’s own passage through life within these figures.

Strength and fragility; splendor and solitude; resolve and uncertainty; reality and dream, the anxiety of transformation and, at the same time, the inescapable necessity of change that belongs to being alive. Someya does not seek to reconcile these apparent opposites, nor does she allow one to cancel out the other. Instead, she permits them to coexist within a single figure, held in a state of quiet tension.

This, perhaps, is where the deeper spirituality of Someya’s painting resides. It is not spirituality as religious iconography, nor as an escape from material existence, but as an attentiveness to what persists beneath appearance: the invisible accumulation of experience through which a person becomes, and continues to become, herself. The paradox of urahaku is therefore also the paradox at the heart of Someya’s women. What is hidden generates what can be seen—the light reaches us precisely because its source remains behind the surface.

In The Light Within, to look at a woman is thus not necessarily to see her. Someya’s paintings insist upon the distance between appearance and being, between the visible body and the interior life it can never fully disclose. Her women retain that distance. Their silence is not emptiness but density; their stillness is not passivity but an accumulation of memory, contradiction, and will. The gold that glows from behind the paper becomes, in this sense, more than a material effect. It offers a compelling metaphor for Someya’s larger artistic project: the invisible does not need to become fully visible in order to illuminate the world.

The Spirituality of the Reverse: Seeing What Cannot Be Seen

Japanese aesthetics has long cultivated an appreciation for what is withheld: rather than rendering everything fully visible, it often leaves something concealed, allowing absence, interval, and suggestion to activate the imagination of the viewer. It would be reductive, however, to equate Someya’s use of urahaku too readily with a generalized Japanese “culture of concealment.” What can be said with greater certainty is that, in her work, what remains unseen often carries as much weight as—if not more than—what is made visible.

This idea finds perhaps its most distilled expression in Slow and Steady Progress (Jokō Zenshin, 2026), the work that opens the exhibition. Much of the four-panel folding screen presents what would ordinarily remain outside the viewer’s field of vision: the reverse side of a byōbu. We are therefore placed in a peculiar position. We are looking at a screen while simultaneously being denied what a screen conventionally exists to present. The act of seeing is made inseparable from the experience of not being allowed to see.

Within the painting, moreover, the depicted screen itself obstructs the world beyond it. Yet the concealment is not absolute. Narrow openings between its panels intimate the existence of another space on the other side. And if one looks closely, a tiny snail can be seen making its way diagonally upward.

Ippodo Gallery identifies the snail as a traditional motif associated with summer and perseverance, describing it as a creature that continues forward where no path yet exists. The decision to construct the composition from the “back” of the screen likewise reinforces Someya’s conception of the reverse: a realm that can be understood as the hidden world of the individual, the private interior that remains inaccessible to ordinary sight.

It is precisely the smallness of the snail that matters. This is no heroic figure advancing triumphantly toward a destination. It simply moves at its own pace, almost imperceptibly, leaving behind the faintest trace of its passage. The image can be read as resonant with the experience of women negotiating their way through contemporary life; at the same time, it is difficult not to see in the snail something of Someya herself—an artist who has spent years patiently searching for a visual language capable of articulating what she seeks to express.

The blue hydrangeas that emerge beyond the screen introduce another dimension: personal memory. Their color is connected to Someya’s experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 and, in particular, to the soft blue light of the moon that remained impressed upon her memory in its aftermath. Transformed into blue hydrangeas, that remembered light has returned repeatedly in her work.

Disaster can turn presence into absence in an instant: a home, a landscape, a person, the texture of everyday life. It is often only after something has disappeared that the full gravity of its former presence becomes perceptible. For this reason, light in Someya’s paintings cannot be understood simply as an emblem of hope. It is a light whose meaning has been altered by darkness—a light apprehended through the knowledge of loss.

This distinction is essential. Someya does not oppose light and darkness as simple metaphors for hope and despair. Rather, one exists within the memory of the other. The blue glow that survives in the hydrangeas is meaningful precisely because it carries within it the experience of what has vanished. Like the metallic leaf concealed behind the paper, its source does not need to be directly visible in order to make its presence felt.

Here again, Someya returns us to the paradox of the “reverse.” What is hidden is not necessarily absent; what has disappeared is not necessarily gone. Memory, grief, endurance, and the will to continue may all inhabit the realm of the unseen, yet they exert their pressure upon the visible world. To see, in Someya’s paintings, is therefore also to become conscious of everything that sight alone cannot reach.

The Splendor of the Four Seasons: A Woman Living Through Time

Among the exhibition’s central works is Pictures of Seasonal Changes in Dress (Shiki Sen’i-zu, 2026), a monumental pair of two-panel folding screens spanning approximately 3.6 meters. Executed in gold and silver leaf, mineral pigments, dyes, Japanese paper, and animal glue, the work consciously enters into dialogue with two canonical masterpieces of Rinpa painting: Ogata Kōrin’s Red and White Plum Blossoms (18th century), which Someya identifies as its primary compositional point of departure, and Tawaraya Sōtatsu’s Wind God and Thunder God (early 17th century).

In Kōrin’s National Treasure Red and White Plum Blossoms, a stylized stream runs through the center of a pair of two-panel gold-leaf screens, separating—and simultaneously binding—the red and white plum trees that occupy either side. As the MOA Museum of Art in Shizuoka has observed, the white plum extends dramatically beyond the pictorial field, while the red plum spreads across its opposing screen; between them, the current of water generates a dynamic tension across the composition.

Sōtatsu’s National Treasure Wind God and Thunder God, meanwhile, places the wind god Fūjin on the right and the thunder god Raijin on the left. Suspended against an expansive field of gold, the two deities confront and answer one another across a seemingly empty interval. Yet that gold ground is anything but empty. As the Kyoto National Museum has noted, it operates as a pictorial space suggestive of “infinite depth,” transforming absence into an active spatial presence.

Someya carries the art-historical memory of these two works into the body of the contemporary woman. In Pictures of Seasonal Changes in Dress, the figure on the right, with her youthful presence, is enveloped in plum blossoms, cherry blossoms, and willow—plants evocative of spring and summer. Opposite her, a more composed figure wears the imagery of autumn leaves, bellflowers, and bamboo, invoking the passage from autumn into winter.

Neither woman stands upon the ground. They appear instead to be carried through space as though by wind, their bodies curved inward as they turn toward one another. Yet it would be too simple to read the composition merely as a contrast between youth and maturity. The two figures might equally be understood as different moments in the life of a single woman.

Spring gives way to summer, autumn to winter. Youth moves toward maturity; beginnings carry within them the knowledge of endings. And after winter, spring returns. The seasons in Someya’s screen therefore function not only as phenomena of the natural world but as metaphors for an interior experience of time.

This is where Someya’s dialogue with Rinpa becomes particularly compelling. She does not simply quote the motifs or compositional structures of Kōrin and Sōtatsu. Rather, she reorients their fundamental principle of duality—the plum trees separated by flowing water, the two gods suspended across an expanse of gold—toward the temporal existence of a woman. The interval between her two figures becomes not merely physical space, but time itself.

What separates them may be years, experiences, losses, transformations. Yet what separates them also connects them. Just as the stream between Kōrin’s plum trees belongs to both sides of the composition, the passage of time belongs equally to the younger and the more mature self. One does not negate the other. Each contains the possibility, and perhaps the memory, of the other.

The women Someya paints are therefore not beings diminished by time. They are beings who inhabit change, assuming different forms as life moves through them. There is beauty in spring, but there is also beauty in winter; beauty in flowering and beauty in falling away. To insist only upon the blossom at its peak would be to deny the larger cycle to which it belongs.

Here, again, Someya’s deeper concern is spiritual rather than merely pictorial. The quiet strength of her women does not lie in resisting change or preserving an immutable image of the self. It lies instead in their capacity to pass through change—to accept transformation without surrendering the continuity of an inner being.

Perhaps this is what makes Pictures of Seasonal Changes in Dress more than a contemporary homage to Rinpa. Someya takes one of Japanese art’s most enduring subjects—the passage of the seasons—and turns it inward. The seasons no longer unfold only across nature; they unfold within the self. Her women suggest that identity is not something preserved by remaining unchanged, but something continually remade through time. To live is to change; and to change, in Someya’s world, is not necessarily to lose oneself, but to become oneself again and again.

Tagasode: A Woman Made Present Through Absence

Another important point of reference in considering the spirituality of Someya’s work is the Japanese artistic tradition of tagasode—literally, “whose sleeves?” The phrase is generally traced to a poem in the spring section of the Kokin Wakashū (905 CE), the first imperially commissioned anthology of Japanese poetry: “More moving than their color is their fragrance—whose sleeves have brushed against the plum blossoms at this dwelling?” In later centuries, tagasode became the name for a type of scented sachet, and from the Momoyama through the Edo period, the term came to designate images of sumptuous garments draped over clothing stands, their wearers conspicuously absent.

In the seventeenth-century Tagasode Screens by an unknown artist in the collection of the Nezu Museum in Tokyo, exquisite robes and furnishings fill the composition, yet the people to whom these garments belong are nowhere to be seen. The museum describes the conceit as one that invites the viewer first to admire the garments, then to imagine the fragrance with which they might have been perfumed, and ultimately to evoke the lingering image of the person who once wore them.

The paradox is crucial: by withholding the figure, the image makes her presence more palpable.

This offers another key to understanding Someya’s art. Her own engagement with tagasode draws upon memories of the kimono her mother once made. The garment, then, is never simply a beautiful object. It carries the memory of the mother’s hands, the accumulated time of family life, and the imprint of a body no longer physically present. The kimono becomes, in effect, an absent body.

The person may be gone, but the garment remains. The body may disappear, but memory persists. Even after the visible figure has vanished, something of her presence lingers, like a fragrance in an emptied room. Here again, Someya is less concerned with painting what can be seen than with making us conscious of what cannot.

In Autumn Echoes (Shūsei, 2026), three black swallowtail butterflies move across an opulent field of autumn bellflowers and overlapping passages of orange and violet, interwoven with water patterns recalling the visual language of Rinpa. The butterfly inevitably evokes metamorphosis. However, transformation in Someya’s world is never synonymous with uncomplicated liberation. To change is to encounter possibility, but also uncertainty; to become something is, inevitably, to cease being something else.

Autumn itself occupies such a threshold. It is the season poised between ripeness and decline, abundance and disappearance. The splendor of Shūsei therefore contains an undercurrent of unease. At the very height of beauty, the possibility of its ending has already entered the picture. This is not a negation of beauty but part of its condition: the awareness that what is most vivid is also transient.

In Soaring Light (Kōshō, 2026), the garment associated with tagasode is abstracted still further. Even the collar has disappeared, leaving something closer to a vestige of the body than to clothing itself. Before it, a single sparrow cuts sharply across the composition. Small and unassuming, the bird flies decisively from left to right. Its trajectory suggests forward movement without hesitation.

The direction of this flight is itself intriguing. Traditional Japanese writing was conventionally read in vertical columns proceeding from right to left across the page. The sparrow’s movement reverses that orientation, following instead the left-to-right progression familiar to Western reading. Without reducing the gesture to a simple opposition between “Japan” and “the West,” the reversal can nevertheless be read as significant: a movement away from an inherited direction, and toward another spatial and cultural orientation. In the context of Someya’s extended period in New York, the sparrow’s flight acquires an additional resonance—not as a rejection of where one comes from, but as the possibility of moving beyond a predetermined path.

Behind the bird stands bamboo. Its symbolism adds another layer to Someya’s conception of strength. Bamboo bends readily yet resists breaking; its resilience lies precisely in its flexibility. The Japanese expression take o watta yō na seikaku—literally, “a personality like split bamboo”—similarly associates bamboo with a character that is forthright, clear, and free of lingering ambiguity.

Here, too, strength in Someya’s work should not be confused with hardness. Her strength is the strength of that which can bend without breaking.

In this respect, the sparrow of Soaring Light answers the tiny snail in Slow and Steady Progress. One flies; the other crawls. Their speeds could hardly be more different, yet both continue forward. Progress need not be swift, spectacular, or heroic. Survival itself need not announce its triumph.

Across these works, Someya gradually dismantles the conventional opposition between vulnerability and strength. To be strong is not to remain untouched, nor is it to resist every transformation imposed by time, loss, or circumstance. Strength may instead reside in the capacity to be wounded, to waver, to change—and still to continue.

The absent woman of tagasode, the transforming butterfly, the bending bamboo, the sparrow in flight, and the slowly advancing snail all return us to the same underlying proposition. What endures is not necessarily what remains unchanged. Sometimes what endures is precisely what has learned how to change without losing the invisible thread of itself.

From the Reverse Side of Tradition Toward the Future

In recent years, Someya’s practice has increasingly unfolded between Japan and New York, and this movement between two cultural and perceptual environments has introduced a new perspective into her work. Reflected Landscape (Tōkei, 2026) is perhaps the clearest expression of this shift.

Japanese and English do not organize language in the same way; as language changes, so too can the structures through which we perceive and interpret the world. For Someya, however, the point is not to establish one perspective as correct and the other as its opposite. Rather, she proposes that something essential may become perceptible only when we are willing to look at it from the other side.

The idea bears a striking resemblance to the logic of urahaku itself. In reverse-side metal leaf, the artist works from behind in order to transform what appears on the front. In Inverted View, similarly, one approaches a world by looking at it from its opposite side. The reverse does not negate the front. Neither can exist meaningfully without the other. Front and back are not competing realities, but interdependent aspects of a single whole. This reciprocity may lie at the heart of Someya’s practice today. 

Someya studied Japanese painting at Tokyo University of the Arts before pursuing advanced studies in the conservation of cultural properties. She subsequently held several teaching and research positions at the university, including research assistant, part-time lecturer, and assistant professor. Her works have entered the collections of institutions including the Adachi Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Ibaraki, and the Sato Sakura Museum, and she has received multiple awards at the Inten, the long-established annual exhibition associated with the Japan Art Institute.

Someya, in other words, is not an artist who borrows the language of Nihonga from the outside. Her knowledge of its materials, techniques, and histories is embodied, accumulated through years of training and practice. It is precisely because she knows the tradition from within that she can treat it not as a completed form to be preserved intact, but as a living language capable of transformation from within.

This approach was already evident in a/synchronous, her first New York solo exhibition in 2021. There, in Night and Day Cherry Blossoms, Someya again invoked Kōrin’s Red and White Plum Blossoms, bringing apparently contradictory conditions—day and night, hare and ke (the extraordinary and the everyday), two-dimensional ornament and three-dimensional corporeality—into coexistence within a single pictorial field.

Five years later, in The Light Within, that investigation appears to have turned still further inward. Front and reverse. Light and darkness. Presence and absence. Youth and maturity. Strength and vulnerability. Tradition and contemporaneity. Japan and New York. Someya does not resolve these oppositions by choosing one side over the other. She inhabits the interval between them, allowing seemingly contradictory states to remain simultaneously present within the same image.

The same is true of the women she paints. Someya’s figures are not simply images of “strong women.” They can be strong and vulnerable at once, resplendent yet solitary, beautiful yet unsettled, outwardly still while inwardly in motion. Their complexity resides precisely in Someya’s refusal to eliminate these contradictions. A human interior, after all, cannot be contained within a single adjective.

This is also why the “light” in The Light Within cannot mean brightness alone. It is a light that has known darkness, a light that carries the knowledge of loss, and a light that recognizes the fear inherent in transformation and nevertheless moves toward change.

Seen in this way, Someya’s technique of urahaku becomes more than a distinctive material process. It becomes almost an ethic of representation. Gold and silver are not displayed ostentatiously on the surface; their luminosity must travel through the fibers of Japanese mulberry paper before it can reach the viewer. What matters is not the precious metal itself, but what happens to its light through concealment, mediation, and distance.

The strength of Someya’s women operates in much the same way. It does not need to declare itself loudly in order to exist. It resides somewhere beneath appearance: unseen, perhaps, but unmistakably present.

There is a further significance in Someya’s decision to pursue these questions through Nihonga. A medium deeply rooted in Japanese artistic tradition becomes, in her hands, a means of addressing experiences that are unmistakably contemporary: the instability of identity, the negotiation between cultures, the passage of women through different stages of life, the persistence of memory after loss, and the possibility of remaining oneself while continuing to change.

Tradition, in this sense, is not behind her. Nor is the future simply somewhere ahead. The two meet within the work itself. Perhaps this is ultimately what the “reverse” means in Someya’s art. To turn something over is not necessarily to reject what came before. It may instead be a way of discovering what the familiar surface has concealed all along—and, from that other side, imagining what might come next.

In The Light Within, Someya is approaching a distinctly contemporary form of spiritual expression through one of Japan’s most traditional pictorial languages. Like the gold and silver concealed behind her paper, the essential force of her women does not reside in what is immediately revealed. It glows from somewhere deeper: shaped by memory, loss, contradiction, and change, yet refusing to be extinguished.

That quiet radiance—the light that survives because it has passed through darkness—is the “light within” that Someya has spent years learning how to make visible.