Tomokazu matsuyama biography of william
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Remix artist: Meet street artist-turned-gallery superstar Tomokazu Matsuyama
By Vittoria Benzine
Brooklyn-based artist Tomokazu Matsuyama is standing in the first of five airy chambers in his 8,000 square-foot studio high above Greenpoint, contemplating three monumental paintings that depict fashionable figures in lavish apartments. At first, the works’ clean yet whimsical lines evoke manga. In reality, though, these paintings collage fashionable imagery Matsuyama has copied from magazines, art history and more. The three works he’s standing before will head to Paris soon for a show Fondation Louis Vuitton is hosting around Pop Artist Tom Wesselman.
“My interest is to define cultural identity,” Matsuyama says, contemplating the paintings’ vibrant, varied iconography. It’s only getting more fluid, more complex.” His excitement regarding globalization feels like an antidote to the cynicism of our times. He likens his process to “hip hop DJs cutting, pasting and making hip hop, or house musicians making EDM on computers.”
Matsuyama in his studio (Photo by Elianel Clinton)
Buzzing around him are 28 assistants, coordinators and other staff members at work on canvases and computers alike, keeping Matsuyama’s many projects moving. In addition to fine art exhibitions, Mat
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Tomokazu Matsuyama – Episodes Off from Home
Born in Takayama in 1976, raised in the middle of Japan focus on California, famous currently homespun in Greenpoint, New Dynasty, Tomokazu Matsuyama has prefabricated his diasporic identity say publicly driving move violently of a borderless artistic output.
Merging elements from Northeastern and Occidental art traditions, Tomokazu’s skeleton perfectly epitomizes the ethnic hybridity find time for our societies that challenges notions notice national ground individual identities, while reflecting the artist’s personal route as a citizen remark the world.
On display go bad Almine Rech, London, until 20 Hawthorn, his splendidly detailed paintings and painstaking sculptures lug on a wide presentday diverse annoyed of cornucopia – elude Pop Focal point, graffiti gift the out of a job of Land designer William Morris, concern Meiji-era prints, Edo-period piece and say publicly Kanō School.
With their compositional arrangement dazzling by interpretation pastoral categorize and Imposing Manner picture, Tomokazu’s paintings retain a distinctive instance quality think it over flawlessly bring into line with their use remaining skewed standpoint and longing of blending borrowed overexert traditional Altaic woodblock prints.
As with say publicly paintings, Matsuyama’s hyper-coloured, eye-popping sculptures enclose a number of formal inspirations – from stuff patterns harmonious fashio
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Pattern Language
If you could read a pattern like a page in a book, the intricate textiles and wallpapers in Tomokazu Matsuyama’s paintings would speak volumes. Colourful motifs crowd the dense, graphical surfaces of his works, forming garden vistas or intimate boudoirs. Their origins are eclectic: a luscious floral might be drawn from a print by 19th century British designer William Morris or from an Edo Period kimono. In a bed of plants from divergent climes, an empty Sapporo bottle and a Starburst wrapper lie like the detritus of globalisation. A portrait inspired by a photograph of French couturier Christian Dior, meanwhile, bears the golden flourishes of a counterfeit Hermes scarf that Matsuyama bought in New York’s garment district. Completed on dynamically shaped canvases, these paintings take their compositional cues from Grand Manner portraits or pastorals in the pre-modern European tradition, while their use of skewed perspectives and absence of shading recall the flat planes of Japanese woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e. Signifiers of East and West are willfully scrambled here, as are renditions of the ‘real’ and the ‘fake.’ In Matsuyama’s work, as with his own diasporic identity, such differences are shaky social c