Word: nihonga
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...keep up time-honored skills. "You have to be based in the tradition, but if you can maintain that, and at the same time do something new, that's a formula for success," says Kenji Nishimura, a veteran Tokyo art dealer. Like many supposedly venerable Japanese traditions, however, nihonga actually isn't that ancient. The term was coined during the Meiji period in the late 1800s, when artists and critics-including a number of Japanophile European expatriates-became alarmed at the way the country seemed to be shedding its cultural skin in the process of rapid Westernization. They called...
...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...
...While Tenmyouya's work is troubling, Machida's demented and deformed dolls are probably among the most disturbing images you will see from neo-nihonga artists today-as well as the most accomplished. The 37-year-old Machida started out painting in the traditional nihonga style-which emphasizes rich color-before abruptly shifting to drawing only in stark, monotone lines. "Colors weren't really fitting my character," she says (nor, one might add, the bleakness of her subject matter). Her art teachers initially dismissed her new style-"they said it's not painting; it's just manga," she recalls...
...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't divorced from Japanese tradition-they're part of it, even as they push it forward. The Meiji-era critics who built nihonga as a kind of artistic Great Wall against Western invasion needn't have worried...