Tomio Koyama Gallery Kyobashi is pleased to present Yuko Someya’s solo exhibition Soil and stars. This marks the artist’s sixth solo exhibition—and their first in two years—with the gallery, showcasing a collection centered around new works.

In recent years, Yuko Someya relocated her home and studio to Okayama Prefecture. The area in which she resides, known as Hiokidani (日置谷), translates literally to “sun-placed valley” (with the character 日 meaning “sun,” 置 meaning “to place/put,” and 谷 meaning “valley”). This exhibition presents works that the artist created while living among those mountains and valleys, and while grounded in the earth’s soil.

Yuko Someya is an artist who has developed a unique and new style of expression, intertwining familiar landscapes with memories from her own childhood, experiences of life changes, and fundamental aspects of life, such as death, birth, and nature. Her fantastical artworks, where various flora and fauna intermingle, in all their vibrancy could be described as contemporary renditions of the traditional bird-and-flower painting. However, the new works presented in this exhibition, while building upon those past expressions, were born from an engagement with nature that far transcends the artist’s own imagination.

“Since I started my vegetable garden, I have become acutely aware of the sky. I feel an intimate closeness to every living thing above and beneath the soil, while simultaneously sensing an overwhelming distance opening up between us.

I’ve come to realize that it’s much like gazing at the stars or peering into deep space.
It’s right there before my eyes, yet I cannot see anything of what I truly wish to know.
I’m always lost, still with no idea where to place the dots.
I’ve started to think that a whole cosmic, multidimensional world is unfolding even beneath the soil.”

Living together with the soil, Someya states that she began to imagine that “there might be a connection between what happens in the soil and how the light of the stars reaches our eyes.”

Furthermore, the artist has provided the following comments regarding her two large-scale works presented in the exhibition.