The Louis Vuitton City Book, the walls of Charles de Gaulle Airport — when Paris wants to show the world its most beautiful self, it often turns to this Japan-born, Paris-based illustrator. She paints cities, landscapes, still lifes and portraits, but what stays with you are her interiors — rooms that don’t quite exist. With her solo exhibition Intérieurs Imaginaires now open in the Marais, I sat down with Yukiko Noritake to talk about her path as an illustrator and those imagined interiors.
Intro of Yukiko Noritake：
Yukiko studied French language and culture at university in Japan and worked at a Japanese industrial company before committing fully to art. She moved to Paris in 2015 and graduated from École de Condé in illustration and visual communication in 2018.
She paints meticulously in acrylic, building imagined interiors that bring the formal beauty of Art Déco together with a delicacy and sensitivity rooted in Japanese culture — furniture, plants and the occasional animal in quiet conversation. Her graduation project, Voyage au pays des odeurs, written by Anaïs Martinez and Oriane Daveau, was published by Actes Sud Junior the following year; in 2020, La forêt des frères, which she both wrote and illustrated, went on to win the 2021 Prix Libr’à Nous, voted by 304 independent francophone booksellers.
Beyond publishing, she has created visuals for Louis Vuitton, Piaget, Pierre Hermé and others. Her current solo exhibition, Intérieurs Imaginaires (Imagined Interiors), is held at Galerie Virginie Lesage.
Interview:
You studied French culture in Japan and began your working life there before committing fully to art and moving to Paris. What did France represent to you from afar, and how did living here change that image?
To be honest, the gap between my expectations of France while studying French culture in Japan and the reality of living here was largely within what I had anticipated. The French studies program at my university covered a very broad range of subjects. It went beyond language and culture to include social issues and current affairs, so I was already aware of aspects of French society that differed considerably from the glamorous image of France that is often portrayed. As a result, I was not particularly overwhelmed by the contrast between the idealised image and the reality, as some people describe.
