Mika Urakami, a Tokyo-based bead artist and cultural preservationist, has garnered international recognition for her intricate reinterpretations of traditional ukiyo-e woodblock prints using fine bead embroidery. Her work marries the precision of Edo-period visual aesthetics with the textured, labor-intensive artistry of contemporary beadwork, resulting in hybrid creations that both honor and transform one of Japan’s most celebrated art forms. Through her bead-encrusted ukiyo-e pieces, Urakami reanimates the floating world not as a static echo of the past, but as a tactile, glimmering realm of rediscovery and artistic innovation.
Trained in textile design at Tama Art University and steeped in the rich visual culture of her native Kyoto, Urakami began her artistic career studying traditional dye techniques and hand embroidery. However, it was her encounter with antique bijin-ga—images of courtesans and beautiful women—from the ukiyo-e canon that catalyzed her shift toward beadwork as a primary medium. Drawn to the stylized faces, delicate fabrics, and ornamental layering of prints by Kitagawa Utamaro, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, and Katsushika Hokusai, she became fascinated by the idea of translating the two-dimensional discipline of printmaking into a textural, three-dimensional interpretation that invited both touch and light.
Urakami’s process begins with archival-quality reproductions of ukiyo-e prints, which she overlays with translucent fabric to serve as a beading guide. Using ultra-fine silk threads and precision-made Japanese seed beads—some measuring less than one millimeter in diameter—she embarks on an exhaustive embroidery process in which each line, color wash, and ornamental detail is rendered bead by bead. In works such as her reinterpretation of Utamaro’s Takashima Ohisa, the original’s subtle gradations of skin tone are recreated with matte glass beads in up to twenty variations of ivory and peach, while the figure’s elaborate hairpins are stitched with metallic threads, gold-plated beads, and freshwater pearls. The final effect is one of uncanny fidelity combined with tactile dynamism—an echo of the original that shimmers with contemporary texture.
Her most ambitious project to date is a triptych titled The Glimmering Wave, based on Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. In Urakami’s version, the frothing crest of the wave is composed of overlapping layers of crystal-cut beads and translucent sequins, arranged in tightly packed whorls that evoke both foam and snow. Each bead catches the light differently, giving the illusion of movement even in stillness. The boats beneath the wave, embroidered with minute tubular beads in indigo and brown, bow beneath the weight of the wave, their contours outlined with rows of black thread that mimic the sharp ukiyo-e lines. The background, traditionally a flat pale sky, is rendered with silk tulle stitched with smoky beads in gradiated tones, suggesting mist, breath, and atmospheric depth. When displayed in gallery light, the work does not merely imitate the print—it radiates, creating a living field of motion where every bead glints like salt spray.
While the visual fidelity to historical prints is one of Urakami’s signatures, her work also contains deliberate departures from the source material. She often incorporates beads made from semi-precious stones such as jade, coral, and lapis—materials historically used in Japanese ornament but absent from woodblock prints. In her series Bijin Transfigured, she embellishes the robes of courtesans with intricate floral motifs drawn from Meiji-era kimono patterns, introducing layered symbolic narratives about femininity, ephemerality, and social roles. The surface of each figure’s garment becomes a second canvas, beaded in radiant silk threads and mother-of-pearl inlays, suggesting not only texture but accumulated memory.
Urakami’s beadwork is also an act of temporal layering. While ukiyo-e was once a mass-printed medium designed for wide distribution and consumption, her reinterpretations are one-of-a-kind, labor-intensive pieces that reverse the democratizing impulse of the original prints. A single panel can take her upwards of six months to complete, with entire days dedicated to shading a single strand of hair or rendering the curve of an obi sash. This slowness is intentional, and Urakami often speaks of her process as a form of meditation, a quiet resistance against the pace of the modern world. She likens each bead to a syllable in a prayer or a breath in a dance, saying that “to bead is to slow down the image until you can hear its silence.”
Beyond technical mastery, Urakami’s beadwork is a mode of cultural preservation and recontextualization. Her practice reflects a broader desire to recover the sensorial dimensions of Japanese visual heritage—the tactile feel of brocade, the shimmer of lacquer, the weight of a hair ornament—and reintegrate them into the present. She works closely with historians and print scholars to understand the social and symbolic context of her source material, and has even developed a lexicon of stitch patterns that correspond to different ukiyo-e schools. For example, swirling chain stitches might be used to indicate the theatrical flair of Kuniyoshi’s warriors, while micro backstitching captures the subtle restraint of Hiroshige’s landscapes.
Her works have been exhibited at major institutions including the Kyoto National Museum, the British Museum, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, where her pieces are often displayed in custom lightboxes that highlight the interplay between bead, shadow, and surface. Viewers have described her work as “painterly embroidery,” “textile lithography,” and “beaded hallucinations”—testaments to the hybrid and almost alchemical nature of her art. In private collections, her beaded ukiyo-e works are treated not only as artworks but as heirlooms, cherished for their capacity to transmit cultural memory through the intimacy of stitch and sparkle.
Mika Urakami’s beaded ukiyo-e prints are more than just exquisite acts of homage—they are a reawakening of one of Japan’s most beloved visual traditions through the lens of contemporary craft. By translating ink and pigment into bead and thread, she reintroduces sensuality and tactility into a genre known primarily for its flatness and reproducibility. Her work speaks to the persistence of beauty, the quiet power of patience, and the enduring dialogue between past and present, material and illusion. In every bead she stitches, Urakami invites us to look again, more slowly, more deeply, and to find wonder glimmering in the spaces between thread and time.