Continuing through June 28, 2014
If you’re fascinated with Japanese culture and art, don’t miss Yuko Someya’s current show. Her works are beautiful, delicate floral paintings inspired by Japanese literature. They have this fairy tale aesthetic, as if you’re standing in paradise with exotic birds flying over your head and flower petals dropping on you. “Under a large floating cloud, I listen to the sounds of flower petals opening,” Someya said. And this underlying poetry in her works also shimmers through the titles she has given them, such as “Breathing at Rest with Tears Behind” or the “Moon Settling in Water Amid Irreconcilable Differences.”
The large-scale paintings took her from six months to a year to create, for which she used a technique that mixes printing and watercolor painting. Therefore, some parts consist of Japanese conservation paper on which she first printed her images, then glued them on canvas. The other parts are painted directly. Lines created through the small gaps between the edges of the glued papers are exactly what Someya is interested in, because through them she tries “to capture the intimate yet unfamiliar and indescribable existence inside humanity.”
