Painting in Japan Now
These are the artists around whom the most people and the most money are moving in Japan right now. When I built this band I first tried to gather them as the ones who came up from the street, and the ledger stopped me. KYNE is the only one who actually came out of street graffiti. MADSAKI states plainly that he has never done anything illegal on the street. Ayako Rokkaku came from an open-submission show with no jury, Ida Yukimasa from the Tokyo University of the Arts, and Matsuyama Tomokazu took a degree in economics and then went to a design graduate school in New York. Their starting points are all over the place. Even so, there is something they share. Every one of them came up from somewhere off the dead center of the art world's main route, and in the 2020s it was the market that moved first, and that is a fact the sources set down side by side. KYNE works in Fukuoka, drawing women with a limited number of colors and an outline. The faces are close to expressionless. And he does not show his own face. In interview photographs he always hides it behind one of his own illustrations. This map has Banksy on it, but with Banksy the identity itself was unknown. Here the identity is known, and only the face is withheld. They look alike, and they are two different types. Ayako Rokkaku uses no brush. She paints directly onto cardboard with her hands, with her fingers. In the early days, the story goes, she gathered the cardboard in parks in Tokyo. Ida Yukimasa paints each person he meets only once. It comes from the idea that you cannot meet the same person, or the same moment, twice. Matsuyama Tomokazu mixes Edo painting, Greek sculpture, the Renaissance and today's pop culture into one plane. In 2020 a seven-meter sculpture of his went up on the east plaza of Shinjuku Station.