Tomokazu Matsuyama
14 collaborations
Matsuyama dismantles the rigid cultural parameters that he felt inhibited by growing up between Japan and America. His bright, complex images merge Eastern and Western art histories, from Pop Art, graffiti and Manga, to the Edo period, and the Kano School of Painting. Matsuyama’s canvases are rarely rectangular. Instead, they take on irregular shapes that often suggest the outline of an ancient Japanese scroll. The figures in his paintings have expressionless faces, and yet are surrounded by comforting symbols of the home like books and foliage. This combination of the familiar and the strange characterises Matsuyama’s oeuvre, and represents his own personal identity in limbo between two different homes, both of which are his, but simultaneously do not feel wholly his own.
