Hanako Murakami’s free Sydney exhibition explores photography through heat and scent

Hanako Murakami’s first exhibition in Australia opened at the Japan Foundation Gallery in Chippendale, Sydney, on 25 September 2026. Called Radiant Force, the free exhibition runs through 27 February 2027 and brings together photographic objects, film, installation and scent. Its focus is the experimental period when people were still working out how an image could be made and preserved.

The Japan Foundation says the exhibition includes new works from Murakami’s Thermography series made with plants selected from the gardens of French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. It also describes a perfume intended to evoke making photographs in the 1820s. Those elements give visitors a way into the exhibition’s central idea: that early photography involved materials, heat and smell as well as the images that survived.

What visitors will find in Radiant Force

The Foundation identifies 2026 Thermography works on copper and glass among the exhibition’s selected works. In an artist statement published with the exhibition, Murakami describes how heating polished copper can produce an iridescent image as a thin film forms on its surface. She says the image’s appearance shifts with the angle of view and the light falling on it. Her account directs attention to the changing surface of an object, rather than to a photograph as a fixed print.

Scent has a documented place in Murakami’s account of this work. In the same statement, she connects her experiments to Niépce’s use of lavender oil and turpentine in early photographic processes. The Foundation presents the perfume in Radiant Force as a way of conjuring the sensory experience of making photographs in the 1820s. It does not establish that the scent exactly reproduces a historical workshop.

Why Niépce’s experiments matter to the exhibition

Niépce’s work supplies more than a historical name for the plant-based pieces. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin dates his surviving camera-made heliograph to 1827 and calls it the earliest known surviving photograph produced with a camera obscura. The center says he coated a polished pewter plate with light-sensitive bitumen dissolved in lavender oil, then left it exposed to sunlight for several days.

The Ransom Center says Niépce called his process héliographie, or ‘sun writing’. It places the public announcements of photography’s invention in France and England in 1839, after his experiments. That history helps explain why Murakami returns to a time before photography had settled into a familiar form: the materials and methods were still being tested, and different processes could leave very different kinds of image.

Murakami’s interest in old processes sits alongside work with newer ways of making images. In a statement for her April–June 2026 Villa Albertine residency in New York, she described a proposed project combining research into photography’s history with artificial intelligence and eye-tracking. That statement records her plans, not completed results. The Foundation frames Radiant Force as an invitation to reconsider photography while AI is changing image-making; it does not say the residency project is on display in Sydney.

How to visit the free Sydney exhibition

The City of Sydney lists admission as free at the Japan Foundation on Level 4 of Central Park, 28 Broadway, Chippendale. Both the City listing and the Foundation give the exhibition dates as 25 September 2026 to 27 February 2027. The Foundation lists gallery hours as 10am to 6pm Monday to Friday and 11am to 4pm Saturday, with closures on Sundays and public holidays.

The exhibition is curated by Antares Wells, according to the Foundation. Its published description covers film, installation, scent works and photographic objects, but the listings do not establish which individual works will be available on any particular visit. Visitors planning a trip can check the current opening details on the Japan Foundation’s exhibition page, especially around public holidays.