SEIZAN Gallery is pleased to present Ami Yamashiro: Pragmatism, on view from January 8 through February 7, 2026, in the gallery’s project space. Marking Yamashiro’s first solo exhibition in the United States, the exhibition features fourteen mezzotints—a distinctive printmaking technique developed in 17th-century Europe—depicting absurd tableaux that merge a Victorian atmosphere with a contemporary sensibility.

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Yamashiro has explained that while studying oil painting in art school, she was “afraid of the white canvas” and often began each work by covering the surface entirely in black. This instinctive approach led her naturally to mezzotint, a printmaking process that closely mirrors this method. The technique begins by roughening a copper plate to produce a fully black surface; the image then gradually emerges through smoothing and burnishing, revealing areas of light.

The medium’s rich blacks, velvety textures, and subtle tonal gradations are especially well suited to articulating Yamashiro’s Kafkaesque narratives, which frequently center on young girl figures. While the artist acknowledges the influence of French modernist Balthus, her protagonists are not presented as passive or voyeuristic subjects. Rather, they confront the viewer with a quiet intensity, inviting psychological engagement and narrative interpretation.

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The exhibition’s central work, Pragmatism, is a diptych depicting two nearly identical girls standing within arched, chapel-like frames, surrounded by symbolic objects and animals. The composition evokes religious iconography and strongly recalls the vanitas tradition of European painting, in which allegorical imagery reflects on mortality, innocence, and moral ambiguity. Yamashiro reinterprets this tradition through a darker, psychological lens that resonates with contemporary anxieties.

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Animals are also a recurring subject in Yamashiro’s practice. Bremen (Social Distance ver.) was completed during the COVID-19 lockdown and draws inspiration from the Brothers Grimm folktale The Bremen Town Musicians, which recounts the journey of four animals traveling together as a makeshift musical group. In Yamashiro’s reinterpretation, the animals—rather than stacking atop one another to frighten robbers at the story’s climax—are deliberately spaced apart. This subtle yet pointed alteration reflects the social isolation of the pandemic era, infusing the familiar narrative with irony and restraint.

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Together, the works in Pragmatism reveal Yamashiro’s precise control of mezzotint and her ability to weave art-historical references, literary sources, and contemporary experience into images that are at once haunting, contemplative, and quietly subversive.

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Ami Yamashiro (b. 1987, Fukuoka, Japan) began studying studio art in high school. She studied printmaking at Tokyo Zokei University and later at Tokyo University of the Arts, where she earned her Master’s degree. Yamashiro works primarily in mezzotint printmaking and oil painting, and her works have been exhibited widely in galleries and museums throughout Japan, where she has developed a strong following. She made her U.S. debut in 2021 in the group exhibition Bedtime Stories at SEIZAN Gallery New York.