EXHIBITION REVIEW: SAMIRO YUNOKI (TOKYO OPERA CITY ART GALLERY)

December 15, 2025 ,featured

Installation view

Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery’s retrospective of Samiro Yunoki, who recently passed away at the impressive age of 102, is less an exhibition than a gentle ambush of recognition. Step inside and you realize you have met this artist before—on a childhood handkerchief, a department-store scarf, perhaps a book jacket you never thought to credit.

Yunoki’s motifs, executed in the chūsen (notezome) resist-dye technique, infiltrate daily life with the quiet persistence of folk songs. The show, on view until the 21st, gathers over 200 works and reminds us why that infiltration feels inevitable.

Chūsen traditionally conjures the crisp, tropical clarity of Ryukyu bingata. Yunoki kept the resist but swapped silk for cotton rag, then pressed the pattern with what looked like a child’s eraser stamp. The result is deliberately imperfect: edges feather, colours pool, and the cloth acquires the soft tactility of something handled rather than displayed.

Sunlight Through Trees, 2019, stencil-dyeing, cotton,, Matsumoto City Museum of Artm photo provided by Gallery TOM / Little Bird, 1992, stencil-dyeing, pongee,Sakamoto Zenzo Museum of Art

A 1960s panel of indigo cranes tilts toward Munakata Shiko’s bold gouge marks, yet Yunoki’s birds retain a rubbery bounce, as if they might waddle off the wall and peck at your shoelaces. The familiarity is disarming; the craft, masterful.

Chronology anchors the final room. A photograph of the young Yunoki in Tabata—birthplace shared with poet Saisei Murō—hangs beside a handwritten maxim: “Live each today and tomorrow as something newer than yesterday’s self.”

The line could read as sentimental until you trace its echo in the art: a 1953 stencil, a 1973 noren curtain, a 1998 collaboration with a kindergarten class. Novelty here is not rupture but gentle iteration, the way a river renews itself while remaining the same stream.

Original art for picture postcard "The Restaurant of Many Orders" c. 1975, Stencil-dyeing, pigment, paper Kogensha photo: Iwane Daisuke

Context arrives unforced. Yunoki studied with Keisuke Serizawa, intersected with Sōetsu Yanagi’s mingei circle, and crossed paths with Bernard Leach during the potter’s Japanese sojourns. None of these connections are shouted; they surface in passing, like old friends waving from a train window. A home-economics teacher who practices indigo dyeing would feel at home here, as would anyone who has ever cut a potato into a stamp.

The exhibition ends where it should: not with a grand finale but with a quiet dare to keep looking. Yunoki passed away just last year, a war survivor, children’s-book illustrator, textile innovator—he carries the stoic clarity Takashi Yanase ascribed to those who returned from the front. The work does not preach resilience; it wears it like well-washed cotton.

Leave the gallery and the city’s neon feels slightly less abrasive. Somewhere in your bag, a Yunoki-patterned furoshiki you bought on impulse shifts against your palm, already planning its next life as a lunch wrap or a gift sleeve. That, the show suggests, is the point: art that refuses to stay on the wall, insisting instead on tomorrow’s small, renewable surprise.