Using her skilled fingers as tools for folding, artist Nishimura Yuko transforms crisp, single white sheets of a special Japanese handmade paper known as kyokushi into two dimensional panels with complex geometrical patterns comparable to the lyrical and rhythmic aspects of music. Even the most subtle play of light across these intricate low reliefs endows them with an unusual energy that excites the senses well beyond visual pleasure. Her unique technical vocabulary produces an almost painterly chiaroscuro that is rare in the monochromatic use of the color white.

As a young contemporary Japanese artist, Nishimura comes from a culture that is long famous for the production and appreciation of hand made paper, washi, and for the complex art of paper folding?a cultural tradition known in Japan broadly as ori no katachi ?which was significantly responsible for the impetus of three dimensional paper sculpture that spread throughout the international art world in the late 20th century.

The freedom with which Nishimura creates a folded straight or curved line, and subsequently hundreds of them to complete an image, with no template other than her conceptual vision of the work, reveals the poet and the musician that inhabits her. The constantly changing length and shape of each fold determines the final square, circular, or oval patterns that sweep across the surfaces of her large scale reliefs.

Nishimura says that in the act of folding the paper is strengthened, allowing her to project the play of light and shadow into physical space and to express her feelings about that space. In doing so, she provides us the experience of being surrounded by her particular music.

In 2001 Nishimura, who now lives in Kawasaki City near Tokyo, graduated from the Architectural Design program of Nihon University in Tokyo where she was awarded a significant prize for her first folded paper relief, and in 2006 she graduated from the Master’s Program in Design from the Department of Art at Tsukuba University in Ibaragi Prefecture. Already in her short professional career, she has been awarded several prizes in notable competitions, including the 54th Modern Art Exhibition at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in 2004 and 2005, and the Tsukuba University Art Award in 2006.

Her work was first exhibited the United States by Keiko Fukai at SOFA Chicago in 2006, and in 2008 she will be featured at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, in a solo exhibition, FOLDED LIGHT, FOLDED SHADOW: Paper Reliefs by Nishimura Yuko.