Word: matsui
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...loose collection of rising Japanese artists who are as well schooled in their country's artistic traditions as they are eager to remake them. Tokyo's Museum of Contemporary Art identified the trend with its 2006 exhibition No Border: From Nihonga to Nihonga, which showcased talents like Matsui and Kumi Machida, whose idiosyncratic ink portraits of macabre toylike figures are the product of supreme painterly skill. You could call these painters "neo-nihonga," a term popularized by the album-cover designer turned fine artist Hisashi Tenmyouya, whose brilliantly colored acrylic paintings tweak symbols of Japanese nationalism and culture. They...
...Hence the phenomenon of Fuyuko Matsui. Though her technique could have been lifted straight from a nihonga textbook-as the holder of a Ph.D. in Japanese painting from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts & Music, it is a skill she has mastered completely-she breaks all the rules of subject matter in Gothic works like Pureness or 2005's Nyctalopia, which features another of her ghostly women, caught in the indecorous task of garroting a live chicken. But what truly sets Matsui apart is her frank acknowledgement of the dark personal motivations that drive her brush, often springing from...
...Renewed interest in nihonga-and those magazine covers-has helped raise the price of Matsui's works from a little over $1,000 to the low six figures. But she is not the only new artist to capitalize on traditional-with-a-twist. After years of holding down a day job as a graphic designer, Hisashi Tenmyouya's paintings now fetch $50,000 or more. Unlike Matsui or Kumi Machida, who graduated from Tama Art University, Tenmyouya is self-taught, and he brings an autodidact's passion to his work. At his spartan studio on the northeastern outskirts of Tokyo...
...painting of two feudal warriors battling for a football was selected as the official art poster for the 2006 World Cup. At first glance, it's easy to dismiss Tenmyouya's paintings as the latest mash-up of Asian culture and the language of fantasy cartoons. But like Matsui, Tenmyouya possesses uncommon talent with his brush, and an ability to satirize at will. In 2002-03's Neo Thousand-Armed Kannon series, he made a stroke-perfect representation of the Buddha of Compassion-but with those thousand arms carrying machine guns, pistols and daggers. Tenmyouya painted it in the wake...
...Even more than Tenmyouya's stylized samurai or Matsui's feminist ghosts, Machida's surreal and often frankly sexual paintings-like Little Boy: Good Luck Talisman-seem to have little in common with staid 19th century forms. But Machida says artistic categories are "just brand names," so she doesn't feel as though she is violating some unwritten code. "I admire Japanese painting, but I learned from the tradition without even noticing it." And that's the point. As diverse as they are, as different as they are from their flowers-and-Mount Fuji predecessors, the neo-nihonga painters aren...