Tomio Koyama Gallery Kyobashi is pleased to present “Changing in the Light,” an exhibition of works by Yuka Kashihara.
This exhibition will feature works that were exhibited at the “Yambaru Art Festival 2024-2025 Yambara Honzen,” as well as Kashihara’s most recent works painted after the festival.

【About the exhibition and the exhibited works: a new form of artistic expression and the voice of one’s soul, obtained through encounters with the landscape and people of Okinawa】
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Light itself is not directly visible to the eye
It becomes “visible” only when it is reflected by something

Sunlight also becomes visible when it hits a cloud, water, or dust
Then you can see “streaks of light”
Dust on the windowsill sparkles, and you feel that there is light there

Things that are invisible to the eye
But whose existence you can really feel

When these invisible presences reach someone, or reach me
They produce gentle reflections
And leave a warm trace in that person’s heart
Even if you can’t see them, they are definitely there
They are already there

Maybe those are the kinds of things I want to paint

Yuka Kashihara
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Yuka Kashihara vividly expresses the fundamental energy of the sea, the earth, and nature using colors with a sense of translucency, such as blue, pink, green, and brown. Although neither humans nor animals appear in her works, through the artist’s unique perspective, they seem to reflect the life force of something invisible, such as the trace of a former presence, the air, or the light, imbuing them with a mysterious power and stir, as if we had managed to steal a glimpse into another dimension.

Based on her experiences in Germany, where she lived for a long time, Kashihara has been depicting inspirations and memories drawn from various kinds of landscapes, such as forests, lakes, mountains, and caves, in the form of mental landscapes that transcend time and space. However, Kashihara’s participation in the “Yambaru Art Festival 2024-2025 Yambaru Honzen” in January-February 2025 represented an important turning point for her, as it marked a major change in her work as well as herself.

Kashihara spent three months in Okinawa, making sketches in various locations and using the memories she was aware of as the foundation for her work.
During her stay there, picking up shells became part of her daily routine, and when she looked at the shells she had gathered, their patterns seemed to spread out and expand infinitely like some sort of landscape painting. According to Kashihara, it was a completely unnerving experience, where things she had previously been unable to see became connected to each other.

Yonaha depicts the excitement of walking around in the unpopulated jungle on Mount Yonaha and seeing sparkling leaves floating like stars in space. Ishiki, for example, expresses a kind of mystical sensation where she felt herself floating in the sea while scaling a mountain, when she went scuba diving at Ishiki Beach on Kudaka Island and the coral reefs in the ocean seemed to overlap with the majestic mountains she had climbed in Laos. When primordial memories, Kashihara’s inner landscapes, and the other side of the world that she had not been aware of became connected, it was as if a light shone on them, and a new world opened up.

In the past, Kashihara had been chasing the light and worrying about what others thought and said. She could not find her own voice, the voice of her soul, because she was looking for it. Then she realized that the light was already there.
Thanks to her new experiences, Kashihara began to paint from her heart without thinking about composition or difficult things, expressing the “invisible beauty” she feels that is not beholden to information or common sense.
Kashihara paints to know who she is, and what she lives for. Her impassioned, sincere attitude may represent an opportunity for viewers to reconsider their own existence, thoughts, and consciousness, as well as the things, people, environment, and nature around them from a new perspective.
We hope you will come and see how Kashihara is tackling this new challenge.

More information on the artist, Yuka Kashihara:
https://tomiokoyamagallery.com/en/artists/yuka-kashihara/