Word: tenmyouya
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...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 may be diverse in style, theme and personality, but what these artists have in common is a fierce devotion to the meticulous work ethic of the solo painter-a welcome change for a scene defined for over...
...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, he kneels placidly on the floor, surrounded...
...already managed that. Tenmyouya's work has been shown throughout Japan, the U.S. and Europe; his 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...
...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...
...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...
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