Image: The Photographers' Gallery, An Un.titled Site
Sayuri Ichida’s exhibition ‘Playing the Piano Upstairs’ enters its final weeks at The Photographers’ Gallery Print Sales Gallery in London, where it remains on view through Sunday 13 September 2026. The series presents handcrafted photographic prints rooted in Ichida’s relationship with her sister and set against the snow-covered landscapes of Niigata, Japan.
Ichida’s work focuses on self-identity and the ways memories shape personal experience. In ‘Playing the Piano Upstairs’, she turns to a family relationship that was distant during the sisters’ childhood. According to the exhibition text, the loss of their mother in their late teens prompted the pair to develop a fragile but enduring closeness. Photographing her sister became a means of tracing that emotional transformation over time.
The images place the sister alongside natural and sculptural forms within the landscape of the siblings’ hometown. Niigata’s long, heavy winters provide the series with a recurring visual environment: snow obscures details, softens contours and creates expanses of pale, luminous space. Ichida describes the snowscapes as “visual metaphors for memory itself; mutable, obscured, yet softly glowing just below the surface.”
The physical production of the prints is central to the exhibition. Ichida combines archival pigment printing with photopolymer photogravure on Japanese washi papers, making each work by hand. The photogravure process is slow and technically demanding, and the gallery relates its reflective, archival character to the act of remembering. Against this subdued surface, vivid pigment introduces flashes of colour and moments of cinematic abstraction.
The combination of techniques mirrors the emotional complexity of the sisters’ shared history. The photogravure prints suggest the traces and partial concealments of recollection, while the brighter pigment elements interrupt the wintry atmosphere. Rather than presenting a straightforward family narrative, the series uses landscape, material and repetition to evoke a bond that has changed through grief and continued attention.
Sayuri Ichida was born in Japan in 1985 and is based in the United Kingdom. Her photographic practice examines self-identity through her own memories and life experiences. The Print Sales Gallery exhibition includes works from ‘Playing the Piano Upstairs’, including ‘Phoka #020’, dated 2023; a related image, ‘Phoka #030’, 2025, is identified in the gallery’s September newsletter image credits. Prices for works in the exhibition start at £675 plus VAT.
‘Playing the Piano Upstairs’ opened on 3 July and is presented at The Photographers’ Gallery Print Sales Gallery, 16–18 Ramillies Street, London, W1F 7LW. All profits from Print Sales support The Photographers’ Gallery’s public programme. The exhibition closes on Sunday 13 September 2026.
