Lingering Lights — Where the Last Glow of Spring Resides: Ayaka Umeda's Solo Show in Ikebukuro

Ayaka Umeda — Artist page
Biography, available works and enquiries

Heated wax pressed onto silk. Acid dye drawn into the fibre. Ayaka Umeda’s paintings are not made of layered pigment; they are made of cloth holding colour from within. Born in Hiroshima in 1993 and trained in textile dyeing at Hiroshima City University, Umeda has spent the last decade extending the centuries-old technique of rōzome (Japanese batik) into the territory of contemporary painting.
Her new solo exhibition, *Where Light Resides* (*Hikari no Arika*), opens on May 28 at Ikebukuro Tobu Art Gallery and continues through June 3, 2026. At its centre is a new work, *Lingering Lights* (2026, acid dye on silk, 515 × 727 mm). A butterfly settles on a fading canola field; the yellow of the blossoms fills nearly the entire surface, while flashes of white — wax-resisted reserves — slice across like residual light. The motif reads at once as an ornamental sarasa pattern and as a fragment of an actual landscape, deliberately collapsing the distance between decoration and depiction.
In rōzome, the painter does not build form by addition. Wax is laid down to refuse the dye; cracks in the cooled wax invite unpredictable veins of colour; the process is irreversible. Each piece is the record of a controlled chance — what Umeda describes as the cloth itself reconstructing the world.
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