EXHIBITIONS
Hiroka Yamashita “白気 White Veils”
Dates: May 16 – Jun 20, 2026
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery Roppongi & Kyobashi
Opening reception: Saturday, May 16, 17:00 – 19:00 (Roppongi)
Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present “White Veils,” a solo exhibition of the work of Hiroka Yamashita, on view from Saturday, May 16 through Saturday, June 20 at the gallery’s Roppongi and Kyobashi venues. Yamashita’s second solo exhibition at Taka Ishii Gallery since 2023, the show features 18 new paintings.
Things without substance borrow forms and appear. …Mist, steam, the smoke of incense, a blizzard… White vapors we encounter in daily life seem to come from somewhere, drift and shift in form, and finally vanish, as though they were living things. These white veils are at once coverings over the world we see and intimations of what lies beyond it. When they stir on a vast scale, one feels in contact with immeasurable presences and histories beyond human reckoning… The quiet, accumulated histories of places and the natural world yield inspiration, and although the whole can never be apprehended, I hope, as a witness to its fragments or a medium for them, to contain that presence within my paintings.
Hiroka Yamashita
April 2026
The exhibition brings together works focusing on the dances and sacred ceremonies of kagura (Shinto ritual dance), a body of material Yamashita has been working on since 2024, alongside paintings that draw on classical snow scenes and waterside settings, each imbued with its own narrative. White, long seen as a sign of the divine, together with the vivid red and heavy black that belonged to the foundational color vocabulary of ancient Japan, have newly entered her palette. Color itself comes to act on the other elements in the picture, as if marking boundaries, and lends familiar, ordinary spaces a quality of striking otherness. Yamashita’s practice is deeply rooted in Japanese mythology and the traditions of animism, taking as its source stories handed down through generations and her own firsthand participation in local rites and festivals. With bold compositions that recall ukiyo-e and other woodcut prints, her canvases are marked by a delicate yet fluid and expansive touch. The human figure, a defining element of Yamashita’s representational style, sometimes emerges, she says, from the painted landscape or scene itself. Her process closely resembles the shifting motion of white vapors, cycling between the embodied act of painting and the disembodied realm of imagination. Yamashita’s graceful forms are unmistakably grounded in a deep inwardness and acute sensitivity, and her landscapes and stories take shape on the canvas, charged with an uncanny presence, as pictorial spaces all her own.
Hiroka Yamashita was born in 1991 in Hyogo, Japan. She earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (New York) in 2017 and an MFA in Arts & Design from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, New Jersey) in 2019. Since returning to Japan she has been based in Okayama, and has held solo shows in the US, Germany, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere. In 2022, she took part in the Fürstenberg Zeitgenoessisch residency program in Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include “Project N 84” at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (Tokyo, 2021), and group exhibitions include “Yes You Can: The Strength of Life through Art” at What Museum (Tokyo, 2022).
