Japanese artist Ninagawa Mika has turned a Soho passageway into an open air gallery. Captive Blooms is a free outdoor exhibition of her large scale photographic work, on display at Soho Photography Quarter, the pedestrianised space just outside The Photographers’ Gallery on Ramillies Street.
It runs from 19 June 2026 to 1 June 2027. Nothing needs booking and there is no closing time to work around, because the images are mounted outdoors on the walls and across the street above, where they can be seen at any hour.
Flowers, goldfish and city nights at full saturation, mounted outdoors on a Soho side street.
What is on the walls at Soho Photography Quarter
Captive Blooms is a site specific installation, so the images were selected and scaled for these particular walls rather than lifted from a touring show. It draws on more than twenty years of Ninagawa’s photography, including the goldfish and water pictures of Liquid Dreams (2003), the flower series Flowers, Shimmering Light (2021) and a new untitled piece made in 2026. Night time city scenes and portraits sit alongside them.
The setting allows a scale indoor galleries cannot manage. Soho Photography Quarter shows work as a large frieze along the main square with banners strung across the street overhead, so the pictures read from the far end of the passage rather than at arm’s length. Cherry blossom is one of Ninagawa’s most recognisable subjects and it appears here in the same intensely saturated colour as the goldfish and the night scenes.
Ninagawa Mika, photographer and film director
Ninagawa, born in 1972, works across photography, film, video and spatial installation. The photography is the best known part of that, though the film career is substantial. She has directed five features, from Sakuran (2007) and Helter Skelter (2012) through Diner (2019) to xxxHolic (2022), and made the Netflix original drama FOLLOWERS (2020). The visual signature carries across both, so anyone who has seen Sakuran will recognise the colour in Captive Blooms straight away.
Recent museum shows include Eternity in a Moment at TOKYO NODE across 2023 and 2024, and NINAGAWA Mika with EiM: Lights of the beyond, Shadows of this world at Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art in 2025. Her wider body of work is set out on her official website.
Pair it with the indoor exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery
Ninagawa is also one of 27 artists in Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now, the ticketed exhibition inside the gallery from 24 June to 27 September 2026. It takes over the whole building with more than 200 photographs, videos, installations and rare photobooks, tracing how women reshaped Japanese photography from the post war years onwards.
Standard admission is £14 on the door and £12 booked online, with concessions at £11 and £9.50. Entry is free from 5pm on Fridays, which is the practical tip worth acting on: between late June and late September a Friday evening gets you the indoor exhibition and Captive Blooms in the same visit for nothing.
The gallery is running supporting events across September 2026 as well, including a one day programme called Beyond Labels: Japanese Women Photographers on Friday 18 September, an Open House tour of Soho Photography Quarter on Saturday 19 September, and a six week online course, Japanese photography reconsidered, from 16 September to 21 October.
About Soho Photography Quarter
Soho Photography Quarter opened in June 2022 and is worth knowing about beyond this one exhibition. It occupies Ramillies Place, a passageway that had been easy to walk past, reworked by Andreas Lechthaler Architecture into a pedestrianised space with seating, trees, planters and lighting. It was developed with Westminster City Council as part of the wider Oxford Street improvement programme and is supported by Arts Council England.
The programme changes roughly twice a year and covers friezes, over street banners, projections, soundscapes and interactive commissions. Captive Blooms is unusual in holding the space for close to a full year.
Visiting Captive Blooms
- Exhibition period: 19 June 2026 to 1 June 2027
- Admission: free, with no ticket or booking needed
- Viewing: outdoors and visible at any time of day
- Venue: Soho Photography Quarter, Ramillies Place, outside The Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW
- Nearest stations: Oxford Circus for the Bakerloo, Central and Victoria lines, or Tottenham Court Road for the Elizabeth and Northern lines
Soho Photography Quarter
Seeing it across the seasons
The length of the run changes how to treat it. Rather than planning a trip around Captive Blooms, it is somewhere to pass through repeatedly, since Ramillies Place is a short detour off Oxford Street. The works are outdoors, so they take whatever light and weather the day gives them, and the blossom and flower images read differently in January than they did in the June light they opened in.
Anyone with an interest in contemporary Japanese photography gets a rare thing here: work by an artist of this standing, at full scale, in a public space in central London, for free, for almost a year. Full details and the wider 2026 programme it sits within are on the exhibition page at The Photographers’ Gallery.
