Word: nihonga
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...That could describe the motivations of a 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...
...nevertheless strays from Matsui to her 2004 painting Keeping Up the Pureness, in which a ghostly pale woman, black hair pooling beneath her head, lies in a misty field of lilies, poppies and moss. Painstakingly drawn on gold silk, Pureness could be a perfect example of nihonga, traditional Japanese ink painting-save for the coroner's cut that unseams Matsui's subject from chest to chaps, leaving heart, lungs and organs exposed to the viewer. This use of classical Japanese artisanship to depict horror-show material is quintessentially Matsui. "I'm not interested in drawing with free form, just from...