SOM GALLERY is delighted to announce ”Each in Three”, a group exhibition by Miyuki Inagaki, Mana Kawamura, and Asami Shiode, on view from October 3 to November 2.
The exhibition seeks to revisit a fundamental question that has haunted painting since the advent of modernism: in what ways can painting exist?

Modernist painting, following Cézanne, pursued the problems of flatness and abstraction, shifting the emphasis from what is depicted to how painting itself comes into being. Postmodern practices later expanded the field by incorporating language, memory, institutional critique, and environmental conditions, displacing painting beyond the confines of representation. Yet in the present, painting is once again compelled to re-establish its relation to the world. Each of the three artists in this exhibition responds to this imperative in distinct ways, intersecting trajectories that together reconfigure painting as a site of becoming.

Miyuki Inagaki begins from the speculative question, “What form has the world taken?” Through sustained observation of familiar environments—gardens, vacant lots, plants, and animals—she gathers sedimented memories and sensations, reconstructing them through the oscillation of multiple perspectives. The resulting images are fluid and indeterminate. Inagaki’s canvases, where delicate brushwork collides with bold gestures, transform the exhibition space into a “garden”: a habitat that admits life and death, the visible and invisible, without distinction, and opens a space of imaginative refiguration for the viewer.

Mana Kawamura grounds her practice in her own poetry and prose, unfolding the traces of language into painting. Words inscribed on canvas blur, dissolve, and ultimately mutate into abstract lines and chromatic fields. These inscriptions bear witness to the simultaneous granting and withdrawal of meaning. Her painterly articulation of literary sensitivity evokes a “world not yet named,” where the act of reading and the act of seeing, perception and imagination, remain in perpetual oscillation.

Asami Shiode takes Cézanne’s still-life apples as a point of departure to confront the near-impossible task of depicting the “thing itself.” Rather than grasping the object as a totalized whole, she allows its manifold and unstable aspects to surface. To this end, she posits an intermediate register she terms “±0.5 dimension,” irreducible to either flatness or volume. In this zone, painting becomes a site where existence resists fixation, offering a model for human relations that sustain connection while preserving distance.

What unites these three practices is their refusal to treat painting as mere illusion or completed image. Instead, they approach painting as an ongoing field shaped by time, language, memory, and relation. Whether by revisiting environments, tracing the collapse of words, or allowing objects to appear without mastery, their work reopens the persistent question: how can painting exist?

Through the resonance of divergent practices, Each in Three positions painting less as image than as lived experience, less as the repetition of modernist discourse than as its unfolding extension—pressing once again the urgent question of what it means to think of painting today.