Melbourne’s Lesley Kehoe Galleries presents ‘Outside Looking In‘, the paintings and sculpture of New York-based contemporary artist, Tomokazu Matsuyama. The exhibition showcases Matsuyama’s individual expression of contemporary culture: Appropriated imagery from traditional Japanese art and folklore perfectly intertwine with Western painterly influences such as Abstract Expressionism and street art.
Described as a ‘hyperkinetic tableau with a dream-like mood’, Matsuyama’s work is accessible: An energetic, techno-coloured narrative, that while engagingly figurative, presents an ethereal manifestation of contemporary urbanised culture. Cultivating the creative freedom of the outsider in Japan and America, he announces his arrival as an accessible and therefore powerful interpretive filter of cultural elements and visual themes.
Matsuyama’s work is similarly influenced by both the austerity of post-war contemporary art and the rough extravagancy of popular culture. Working from Brooklyn, Matsuyama is comfortable in the multi-cultural freedom of New York yet acknowledges the evolving significance of Japanese culture on his work. His artistic passion is driven by identity crisis and a desire to comprehend the mélange of bi-cultural experiences that constitute his biography.
With an upbringing split between Japan and America, Matsuyama spurs questions of national and individual identity. In attempting to decrease the common natural mayhem created by our social environment, he pushes viewers to confront their conceptions of cultural homogeneity.
From the position of outsider, he requisitions images – traditional and contemporary – with an enviable freedom that creates an individual dialogue and artistic tropes addressing the fragmentation of contemporary experience. Through universally recognizable symbols and techniques – visual and non-visual, multi-layered and metaphorical – he is able to connect and invite the viewer to interpret the works subjectively:
‘I’m trying to gather together as many highly specific, local visual dialects as possible, to foster an international visual dialogue. This iconography contains elements of East and West, contemporary and historical, ornamental and conceptual. By integrating all of this cohesively I can create internal collisions, elements fighting against one another. This reflects the chaotic situation of our time. It would be nice, a kind of bonus, `if my works could question viewers about their own identities…’
Discerningly appropriating influences from modern art and Japanese art from the Edo and Meiji eras, Matsuyama’s works are aesthetically exciting and culturally fascinating portraits of life in this time. With the reinterpretation of Edo period imagery combined with contemporary motifs and patterning, Matsuyama blends supposed Eastern and Western aesthetics into something that resists autonomous cultural boundaries and belonging by embracing notions of fusion and hybridity.
As a contemporary artist, Matsuyama’s work is exhibited internationally from Tokyo, Osaka, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, and Vancouver to inclusion in institutions such as the Asian American Arts Centre, The Japan Society and the Reischauer Institute at Harvard University.
Lesley Kehoe Galleries
25 September to 25 October, 2014
Melbourne
1. You Need to Come Closer, 2014, acrylic on canvas 254 x 305cm (2 panels 254 x 152.5)
2. Whatever The Playboy Wrote, It Was As Good As The Great Waves, 2014, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 161 x 254cm
3. Wherever I am, 2009, hand painted FRP matal and wood, 239 x 183 x 89cm
Images courtesy of Tomokazu Matsuyama Studio and Lesley Kehoe Galleries