Statement

Sana Onishi creates two-dimensional works and installations that explore the colors and phenomena emerging from the relationship between light and paint. While light falls equally on everyone, it constantly transforms depending on the state of the material and the surrounding environment. By focusing on these changes and fluctuations, she visualizes the behavior of light through the materiality of paint as a way to explore the relationship between perception and the world.

As a child, Onishi was deeply drawn to paintings that depicted light, and she vividly remembers a primal experience of wanting to “live” inside the layers of paint imbued with light. This formative memory became the starting point of her artistic practice.

Her current work takes two main approaches. One is grounded in the physical act of painting, using the properties of supports and pigments to incorporate light’s physical characteristics—transmission, reflection, absorption, and scattering—into the pictorial surface, visualizing them within a two-dimensional context. The other is a conceptual exploration of the structural relationship between light and color, based on two distinct color theories: additive color mixing (RGB) and subtractive color mixing (CMY).

Through her work, Onishi aims to reconsider the relationship between light and material, between body and perception. Ultimately, she seeks to create experiences that allow viewers to rediscover a renewed sense of connection between the external world and the internal self.