Tomokazu Matsuyama

When Bijutsu Techo, Japan's authoritative art journal since 1948, devoted its entire June 2021 issue to Japan-born, Brooklyn-based artist Tomokazu Matsuyama, critics erupted, questioning the decision to spotlight someone they deemed insufficiently Japanese, even inauthentic.

- Jaeyong Park

Matsuyama studied economics rather than art in Japan, left for New York to pursue graphic design aged 25 and taught himself to paint. He developed his practice outside of the traditional hierarchies that validate Japanese artists - the very structures that rejected him.

‘FIRST LAST’, his show at Azabudai Hills Gallery, presents approximately 40 works spanning painting, sculpture and installation. The exhibition takes its name from the Bible verse Matthew 20:16: ‘So, the last shall be first, and the first last’. In the painting Bring You Home Stratus (2024), Matsuyama merges a traditional Japanese villa with a Beverly Hills courtyard; baroque figures inhabit this composite space alongside tropical foliage rendered in nihonga, a traditional Japanese style. The massive canvas glows with saturated ceruleans and vivid magentas, its bold outlines and flattened forms generating unsettling spatial tension. Combining one-point, two-point and vertical perspectives, the work creates a visual vertigo that never quite resolves.

In We The People (2025), Matsuyama transposes Jacques-Louis David's