The Print Sales Gallery at The Photographers’ Gallery presents Sayuri Ichida: Playing the Piano Upstairs, a series centred on Ichida’s relationship with her sister. Ichida (b. 1985, Japan) is a UK-based photographer who explores self-identity, drawing on personal memories and lived experience.
Through luminous handcrafted prints, Sayuri Ichida reveals ideas of memory, grief and sisterhood against the snowy landscapes of rural Japan. After losing their mother in their late teens, Ichida and her sister gradually developed a fragile yet enduring closeness. Photographing her sister became a way for Ichida to trace the emotional evolution of their relationship.
Ichida creates quiet, atmospheric images in which her sister appears alongside natural and sculptural forms. Set within the often snow-covered landscape of their hometown of Niigata, Japan, Ichida describes these snowscapes as “visual metaphors for memory itself; mutable, obscured, yet softly glowing just below the surface.”
The prints themselves seem to glow. Ichida creates each one by hand using a combination of vivid archival pigments and the slow, highly skilled photopolymer photogravure printing process on Japanese washi papers. Together, these contrasting techniques evoke the complex emotional landscape of the sisters’ shared history.
Prices start at £675 + VAT. All profits from Print Sales support The Photographers’ Gallery’s public programme. Works can also be purchased in instalments through the Own Art scheme; please enquire for further information.
Sayuri Ichida: Playing the Piano Upstairs
03 Jul 2026 – 13 Sep 2026
The Photographers’ Gallery
16–18 Ramillies Street
London W1F 7LW
www.tpg.org.uk
