Check Out Kaoru Samidare’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kaoru Samidare.

Hi Kaoru, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I am a Japan-based colored pencil artist and fine art model, currently working toward obtaining an O-1 visa and relocating to Los Angeles.

I have been drawing for as long as I can remember. After graduating from high school, I found myself unable to adapt to working conventional jobs, so I began sitting on the street and selling my artwork. That was the true beginning of my life as an artist.
And so, while selling artwork locally, participating in events, and holding small solo exhibitions in rental galleries, I connected through social media with the owner of a former Tokyo gallery called Alice to Mamenoki (Alice and Beanstalks). Through that connection, I was eventually able to exhibit my work and consign merchandise in Tokyo.
I was born far away from Tokyo, and at the time I had very little money. I used to take overnight buses for hours just to make those opportunities possible.

Years later, the gallery that helped raise me as an artist, Alice to Mamenoki (Alice and Beanstalks), closed in the autumn of 2015. At the final group exhibition there, I met the owner of Hive Gallery & Studios in Downtown Los Angeles.
After seeing my artwork, he told me:
“I like this kind of work. I hope we can exhibit together someday.”
At the time, however, I had extremely low self-esteem and did not yet understand the value of my own abilities. Until only a few years ago, I had never seriously imagined taking my work out into the world, so I honestly did not even know how to respond when someone from a Los Angeles gallery showed interest in me.

Later, in 2016 and 2017, I had opportunities to send work to Hive Gallery. However, around that same time, years of accumulated stress, family problems, relationship issues, and sexual abuse experiences connected to modeling work began pushing me to my physical and emotional limits.
In the summer of 2016, I left my family home and distanced myself from both my parents and relatives, but by then my mind and body were already in terrible condition. It became difficult to continue creative work the way I once had.
In reality, both my artistic activities and my connection to Hive Gallery almost came to a halt for a time.

The turning point came in 2022.

After many years focused almost entirely on recovery, and after meeting an incredible autonomic nervous system therapist who helped me gradually regain my health, I unexpectedly received a message from the owner of Hive Gallery.
He casually asked:
“We’re doing a show in Osaka, Japan next year. Would you like to participate?”
At that exact time, I had only just begun drawing seriously again little by little, so the timing felt almost fated. I immediately said yes.

That exhibition eventually led to my first feature show at Hive Gallery in December 2024.

From there, my life began changing at overwhelming speed.
Even while still struggling with unstable health and periods where I could barely get out of bed, I desperately continued creating work, launched my first crowdfunding campaign, and even got my first passport.
When the feature show finally arrived, I gave everything I had at that point in my life. Still, I was left feeling that I could have done so much more.
I chose not to make excuses publicly at the time, but ever since then, that frustration — the feeling that “I could have gone further” — has pushed me to devote myself completely to every piece I create.

While I was deeply self-critical about my own exhibition, my first experience visiting Los Angeles completely changed my life.
For the first time, I was able to stand inside the galleries I had admired for years and see the work of artists I respected with my own eyes. That experience gave me something I had completely lost while struggling alone in rural Japan: a clear direction, a standard to aim for, and a reason to keep pushing forward.
For the first time in a long while, I felt a powerful sense of passion return to me:
“This is where I am meant to run toward.”
For me, confronting my own immaturity was not despair — it was hope.

And more than anything else, Los Angeles saved me on a fundamental human level.
The diversity and openness of the city and its people taught me something I had never truly believed before:
“Your existence is not wrong.”
In Japan — in school, in society, even within my own family — I always felt like an outsider.
I spent years believing I was defective, constantly trying to become someone else in order to survive, and repeatedly destroying my own health in the process.
I had never known that a world built on the idea that everyone is fundamentally different could feel so comfortable and beautiful.
I could exist as myself there, without having to become something strange.
For the first time, I realized that all the energy I had wasted trying to explain or justify my existence could instead be used to truly live my own life.
And for the first time, I understood:
“It was okay to simply love myself honestly.”
That is why I want to live in Los Angeles — to properly reclaim and rebuild my life.

After my feature show at Hive Gallery in 2024, I became even more actively involved in exhibiting there, and that momentum has gradually started leading to opportunities with other galleries as well.
In the fall of 2025, I stayed in Los Angeles for seven weeks and participated in group exhibitions at Hive Gallery using works I brought with me from Japan.

There are still endless challenges ahead of me, financially and physically, but I do not think struggling for what I truly want to do is an unhappy thing.
If I were to go through my entire life without ever truly living in Los Angeles, I know I would carry that regret forever.
I intend to do everything I possibly can to make this dream real.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
As I mentioned earlier, my path has never been an easy one.
For a long time, I lived without fully understanding the true nature of my own difficulty living in the world.
Only now do I finally feel that I am truly living my life on my own terms.
I believed I had already been living freely because I was pursuing art, but looking back now, I realize much of my life had actually been built upon inertia, fear, and self-denial.
　

Incidentally, my artist name, “Samidare,” refers to the long seasonal rains of Japan’s rainy season.
I began using that name in middle school because I wanted it to evoke the feeling of endless gloom hanging in the air.
I believe rain will continue to fall throughout my life, and I cannot control the rain itself.
But I can choose how I stand within it.
Those are the kinds of things I hope to continue expressing through both my artwork and the way I live.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I primarily create images of human figures that project my inner world and different phases of my life through layered metaphors.
I try to transform deeply personal experiences into something that can resonate as a more universal philosophy of living.
I want my work to enter deeply into the viewer’s emotions — the kind of images that quietly force people to confront themselves.

I began primarily using colored pencils because I could not afford expensive art materials as a child. Over time, that limitation gradually turned into a challenge: “How far can I go with what I already have?” That process eventually led me to my current style of working exclusively with colored pencils.

“Using something anyone can use to create something no one else can.”
“Not using what I was not given, or not blessed with, as an excuse.”
These ideas are the foundation of my creative philosophy.

In an age driven by efficiency, I intentionally continue working in an inefficient, fully analog style. By doing so, I aim to affirm a clumsy yet painfully honest way of living, while also choosing to live that way myself. I want to express those values not only through the artwork itself, but also through the way I approach the act of creating.

In 2015, I also began working as a fine art model. After becoming independent in 2017, I became increasingly aware of how few opportunities existed in my rural area for studying the human body or even finding fine art models at all. In response, I began organizing monthly nude croquis and figure drawing sessions that anyone could casually participate in.

I believe art is not something that belongs only to a limited group of people, but a freedom that should be open to everyone. There are no absolute right or wrong answers in art, and there is no need to be constrained by common sense or social norms. I believe this way of thinking has the power to save the hearts of people living in the modern world.
I continue these activities with the hope that art can become something more familiar and accessible in the way it was always meant to be, and that it may become a source of support or purpose in someone’s life.

The philosophy shared across both my artistic practice and modeling work is:
“To provide a better tomorrow through creative expression.”

We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
If I had to define success, I would say it means being able to reach the end of my life with no regret.
I want to live in a way that I can truly accept, and someday die with a smile.

Not only through my artwork, but also through my words, my presence, and the way I live, I want to become someone who can inspire others to keep going.
No matter how lost someone becomes, no matter how much damage they carry, I want my life itself to prove that people can begin again.

To me, thinking about how I want to live and thinking about how I want to die are one and the same.
That is why I intend to continue choosing my own way of living and dying, honestly and intentionally, for the rest of my life.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kaoru_samidare?igsh=MW9ncWg2dTNwam5zYQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr