The hue of shade 2, 2026, single channel video, still image

WAITINGROOM (Tokyo) is pleased to present “The Hue of Shade 2,” a solo exhibition by Saori Miyake, on view from Saturday, September 12 to Sunday, October 11, 2026. This marks Miyake’s first solo exhibition at the gallery in approximately three years. Miyake has explored the “painterly image” that emerges through the process of images being shared, working across a diverse range of materials and techniques, including photograms that capture the “shadows” of objects, cyanotypes made through exposure to sunlight, and video works that extend these photographic techniques into time-based media. In her 2023 solo exhibition “Nowhere in Blue” at WAITINGROOM, she used the cyanotype process to create blue-toned landscapes that appear to be “nowhere.” In her 2025 solo exhibition “The Hue of Shade” at ARTRO, Kyoto, she found a commonality between shadows and colors, both of which are perceived relatively depending on given conditions, and presented cyanotypes and video works that explored the nature of color. Building on the explorations developed through these two exhibitions, “The Hue of Shade 2” takes them further, presenting a new video work that combines negative-positive inversion with color toning, alongside a new series of cyanotypes. In the cyanotypes, actual plant shadows are layered over grids that emerge through the enlargement of digital images, which are then further enhanced with hand-coloring. Through her unique approach to making visible the inner dimensions of the act of “seeing,” Miyake explores new relationships between shadow and color.

About the artist, Saori Miyake
Born in 1975 in Gifu, Miyake received her MFA from the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Kyoto City University of Arts in 2000. She currently lives and works in Kyoto. Miyake has been working with a photogram technique that prints “shadows” of drawings by reversing existing images she has encountered, drawing them on transparent sheets where negative and positive space have been flipped, and then exposing them over a layer of photosensitive paper. The images, which are derived from looking at the world once objectified by the camera, poetically reveal narrative, fragmentation, and multilayeredness. Miyake considers the “act of seeing” not only a physical act, but also a psychological phenomenon. In recent years, Miyake has been working on video works that reflect the ideas she has developed through creating these photograms, as well as cyanotypes that are exposed to sunlight. Through these practices, she continues to extract “painterly images” from the process through which human beings direct their gaze toward various things, transform them into images, and layer new gazes onto images that have already been shared. Her recent exhibitions include a group exhibition “Blue and —Shifting” (2026, AOTO Art, Hyogo), solo exhibition “The Hue of Shade” (2025, ARTRO, Kyoto), group exhibition “4th PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale in Kyoto 2025” (2025, Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kyoto), group exhibition “AWT VIDEO: Between Contrail and Mountains” (2024, SMBC East Tower 1F, Tokyo), group exhibition “Gewalt : Devenir des resistances a la violence institutionnelle” (2024, Institut francais de Tokyo, Tokyo), solo exhibition “Nowhere in Blue” (2023, WAITINGROOM, Tokyo), group exhibition “Urban Sansui β” (2023, kudan house, Tokyo), group exhibition “Mirrorless Mirror” (2022, gallery αM, Tokyo), solo exhibition “Artist in Museum AiM Vol.9 Saori MIYAKE” (2021, The Museum of Fine Arts, atelier, Gifu), group exhibition “Oku-Noto Triennale 2020+” (2021, Suzu city, Ishikawa), solo exhibition “Garden | POTSDAM” (2019, SPACE TGC, Tokyo), group exhibition “MOT Annual 2019 Echo after Echo: Summoned Voices, New Shadows” (2019, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo), group exhibition “20th DOMANI: The Art of Tomorrow” (2018, The National Art Center, Special Exhibition Gallery 2E, Tokyo). She has received the “The Kyoto Prefecture Culture Prize for Effort” in 2016, the “Sakuya -konohana award” in the Fine Arts category in 2011, “VOCA AWARD 2010” in 2010, and her works are in the public collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Arts Maebashi, Kyoto City University of Arts, among others.

Left: Blue print (C) #2, 2026, Cyanotype and acrylic on watercolor paper, 17 x 11.5 cm
Right: Blue print (C) #1, 2025, Cyanotype and transparent watercolor on watercolor paper, 340 × 340 mm

Where Shadow and Color Meet
The artist and educator Josef Albers, who taught at the Bauhaus and devoted himself to studying the relationship between color and form, demonstrated that color is perceived relationally. If color is something generated within our inner worlds, then, like the “painterly image” that Miyake describes, color too can be understood as something shared and circulated between people, carrying within it multiplicity and reciprocity.

In this exhibition, which brings together a video work and cyanotypes, Miyake deliberately introduces “color” into the monochromatic and blue-toned worlds she has developed to date. In her new video work, Miyake adds color toning to her established method of negative-positive inversion. Scenes that evoke specific places and scenes that suggest somewhere other than here are projected as though they were blending into one another. These landscapes, which seem to be “somewhere, but nowhere in particular,” takes on a richer narrative as familiar associations between particular subjects and colors are disrupted and reconfigured. In these images, light and shadow are inverted, and color is applied even to areas that would normally be perceived as shadow, inviting us not to grasp information from a detached, panoramic perspective, but rather to close our eyes and return to the inner world.

Cyanotype is a process in which images are printed using sunlight and rendered blue through a chemical reaction involving iron salts. The botanist Anna Atkins used this then-cutting-edge technique to capture the shadows of plant specimens. Following this early use of the medium, Miyake’s new cyanotypes likewise capture the shadows of actual plants. These plant shadows are combined with abstract images created by enlarging multiple digital images and layering the grids that emerge from them. The extreme enlargement reveals the underlying structure of digital images that we ordinarily perceive as unified wholes, while at the same time allowing organic landscapes to emerge within them. Miyake further applies hand-coloring to this blue world, where plants as natural objects coexist with an expanded perspective made possible by technology. By adding the painterly gesture of hand-coloring to photography as a technology for recording objects, Miyake explores how humans respond to technologies and systems, and how these in turn mutually transform one another.

Miyake’s new works explore the emergence of a new kind of “image” in an era of accelerating technological development. This is not an ideal world driven by science-fictional desire, but a reality shaped by a sense of inevitability. Through her practice, Miyake continues to observe and depict the visible and invisible realms, bringing them into relation with one another.

Solo Exhibition “The Hue of Shade” (2025, ARTRO, Kyoto) , Installation View, Photo: Takeru Koroda