A group of women are getting ready to go out. They’re checking their makeup, doing their hair, sewing a quick repair on a dress.

It’s a scene familiar and different. The dresses sit somewhere between Japanese tradition and Western avant garde, kimonos evolving into inter-war eveningwear. The work employed the ground pigments and silk that Japanese artists had used for centuries, but it used them to paint high heels, a hair curler and a makeup compact.

Women preparing for a party (Yosoō hitobito) 1935 by Taniguchi Fumie. Credit:Estate of Taniguchi Fumie

And the life of the artist, too, was a journey walked between ancient and modern, a battle between expectation and experiment.

For decades Taniguchi Fumie, her work, and even her era, were virtually lost to posterity. Now this screen, discovered last year in a private collection in Hawaii and purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria, is the “hero” piece of a new exhibition at the NGV International focusing on Japanese modernism, a reflection of the wave of cultural change that swept through Japan a century ago in an energetic pocket of time before the second world war.