When a Face Becomes a Rainbow

At Soho House Tokyo, Etsu Egami spoke with GEN DE ART's Olivia Matsumoto about miscommunication, the energy of the body and what happens when a painted line enters public space.

Etsu Egami in conversation with GEN DE ART's Olivia Matsumoto at Soho House Tokyo, November 4, 2026. Photo: GEN DE ART

Walk around one of Etsu Egami's illuminated domes in Otemachi and the face changes. The portraits trace one person at different stages of life. The sequence only comes into view as you move, and the person you encounter depends on where you stand. At Soho House Tokyo, Egami told GEN DE ART's Olivia Matsumoto that she hoped the walk would feel like watching someone's life flash before your eyes.

The dome offers a way into a practice that began with a different kind of uncertainty. Egami has spent years exploring what happens when people hear or see the same thing and come away with different impressions. In her paintings, broad parallel bands of colour can suggest the outline of a face, then pull the eye away from it. Her conversation with Matsumoto traced that tension from language to painting, and from painting to the movement of bodies in clothes and in the city.

Etsu Egami speaking at Soho House Tokyo, November 4, 2026. Courtesy of Soho House Tokyo

From the gray zone to the rainbow

"My concept is miscommunication and diversity," Egami said. Studying in Beijing and in Karlsruhe exposed her to settings in which language and sounds could be understood differently. Early work explored those perceptual gaps through sound and installation. In 2020, her Portrait of Communication was shown at the VOCA exhibition at the Ueno Royal Museum.

One experience she returned to at Soho House was a debate class in Germany. Each person put forward an opinion, and the class could end without settling on a single answer. Egami recalled struggling with that at first. Over time, she began to see how much she could learn about the other people in the room precisely because their answers diverged. She described the change as moving "from gray zone to the rainbow." Of the rainbow she said, "Every color is beautiful," calling it a symbol of both hope and diversity.

There is something of that debate in the way her portraits hold together. A band of colour can read as part of a cheek or as a stroke in its own right, and the two readings can coexist. The pandemic made the question of encounter unusually concrete. As Egami recalled, her subject was communication at a time when people could scarcely meet and had to keep their distance.

When the body changes the line

When Matsumoto asked about Dior, Egami spoke about wanting to capture the energy of women in motion. She invited women to dance in her studio and made drawings and paintings from their movements. The session shifted her attention from the face to the lines a whole body makes. In this setting, drawing offered a way to follow movement as it happened, with the dancers determining what Egami had to respond to.

With A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE, the wearer would become part of the work. Speaking about TYPE-XVI Etsu Egami project, her first collaboration on a jacket, she put the ambition simply. "We want to make it as a new sculpture." She was interested in what the painting could become in three dimensions. A jacket moves with the shoulders and bends at the elbow. Its lines are seen differently every time the wearer turns, giving the idea of a shifting portrait a physical form.

Egami, wearing the TYPE-XVI jacket from her collaboration with A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE, presents her GEN DE ART covers at Soho House Tokyo. Photo: GEN DE ART

A place for people to gather

At Otemachi One Garden, Egami initially imagined making a sculpture that would give her painted lines volume. As the idea grew, she found herself asking why she wanted to bring those lines off the canvas. "I wanted to create a place where people could gather," she said. She associated the shape of a dome with shelter and with the warmth of being around other people. The illuminated structure gives passers-by a reason to slow down, circle a portrait and spend time beside strangers in the middle of Tokyo's business district.

Etsu Egami at Soho House Tokyo, November 4, 2026. Courtesy of Soho House Tokyo

Later in the talk, Egami placed this openness within her own reading of postwar Japanese art. She recalled coming of age as an artist when Takashi Murakami's Superflat was a dominant reference point and finding that her own touch was difficult for some viewers to place. In the artists she calls a "third generation," she sees a range of practices shaped by lived experience across borders. The category matters to her for the variety it can contain.

Egami also spoke about her art therapy work at Kyorin University's School of Medicine. She described looking at art as a way of facing oneself and making contact with the world outside. At Otemachi, that possibility starts with an ordinary act. You walk around a face, watch it change and catch sight of someone on the other side doing the same thing.

Etsu Egami and Olivia Matsumoto at Soho House Tokyo, November 4, 2026. Photo: GEN DE ART

Details: Etsu Egami — Talk at Soho House Tokyo Soho House Tokyo November 4, 2026