Yumiko Hirokawa “Silent Resistance”
March 21 - May 30, 2026 - Extended a few more weeks so please inquire if the show’s available for viewing.
Silent Resistance
Even if a time comes when expressing one’s own opinions becomes difficult,
I will continue to paint small flowers, just as I always have.
For me, painting against war is a quiet act of receiving memories and carrying them into the future.
I look toward loss and death that are not always visible, and I listen carefully to pain that has not been spoken.
I make paintings to create a space where viewers can pause and reflect with me.
If, within that space, pain and prayer can be shared, and a hope for the future can quietly begin to grow,
then my painting becomes, for me, a modest practice against forgetting—
and a form of prayer.
Yumi
Mark Jenkins reviews this exhibition Fibers of Being May 26, 2026
Hirokawa paints against war
STYLISTICALLY, YUMIKO HIROKAWA’S precise, luminous pencil drawing of the Potomac is not typical of the work in “Silent Resistance,” the versatile Japanese artist’s Watergate Gallery show. But the picture does share one significant attribute with most of the other pieces: It plunges the viewer into a scene that’s all-over and essentially borderless. The image has literal edges, yet appears potentially infinite.
Many of the paintings in this array depict cascades of white flowers on silver-leafed backgrounds, although others employ a similar format in which the repeated forms are pink blobs that evoke the knit hats of the anti-Trump 2017 Women’s March, while also hinting at cherry blossoms. Although Hirokawa doesn’t portray violence, her calling is “painting against war,” says her statement.
This interest is both universal and personal. Then a Corcoran student, Hirokawa was living in Washington on 9/11; a half century earlier, her father witnessed the Nagasaki A-bombing from a distance. Two “Canna” paintings portray a flower that survived the nuclear assault on Hiroshima, and the rendering of a crocodile that lives in a bomb crater invokes another American war. Sometimes violence and enduring nature are juxtaposed directly, as when the artist floats a blue dragonfly near two circling helicopters, also blue, inspired by the ones she saw in the sky over Arlington after 9/11.
Most of the show’s entries are flat and impressionistic on gleaming silver- or gold-leaf backgrounds. But the crisp realism of the artist’s drawing of the Potomac is seen in a few other pictures. Oil and tempera paintings of a Shirley Temple doll and a rabbit nestled in foliage demonstrate that Hirokawa has mastered traditional Western representational art. Yet that serves just as the foundation for art that’s visually immersive and thematically sweeping.
Yumiko Hirokawa was born and grew up in Osaka, Japan. Yumiko is a 2003 graduate of the Corcoran Collage of Arts and Design. She also graduated the Doshisha University in Japan. She has exhibited her art in Japan, China, Korea, and the US. Her work is housed in the collection of Ninbo Museum of Art in Ninbo, China. As a student at The Corcoran at the time of the September 11th attack that event has been a major influence on the direction of her art. Her art is a prayer for the many people who have suffered from disasters and conflicts around the world. She has painted scenes of modern society using aluminum leaf.
