“Each culture has its own overestimation and pride, but interestingly, they imitate each other’s designs too. This realization…allowed me to overlay different identities and cultures in one picture as a way to talk about globalism. What is revealed is neither American, English, nor Asian; it’s utopian.”
— Tomokazu MatsuyamaA mesmerising example of Tomokazu Matsuyama’s reimagined Japanese imagery, Mrs Omega depicts a shishi, the iconic guardian lion-dog often found outside Buddhist and Shinto shrines. A historic staple of Japanese art painted by the likes of Kyosai and Hokusai, they also represent a triumph of cultural cross-pollination, long known as Komainu (‘Korean Dog’) and influenced by Chinese motifs and Indian religious practices. This is fitting for an artist who unites visual sources from across wildly different media, and he furthers it through the use of a tondo shape, a staple of Renaissance painting typically used for religious scenes, and vividly deployed by modern abstract artists such as Robert Delaunay. Sacred visual tropes are freed from traditional limits in his art, and given a brilliant new vitality by his electrifying style.
This feeling of cultural fluidity has deep roots for the artist, who was born and educated in Japan but spent four years of his childhood in America. Moving back, ‘I was never able to fully adjust myself back to Japanese in the classical sense, but at the same time, I really didn’t feel U.S being my home after returning later in life as they saw me as Asian or Japanese for the nature of how I look and the color of my skin.’i
Kanō Tsunenobu, Pair of panels depicting shishi lions (from the Seiyouin mausoleum in Edo), circa 1710.
@ Museum of Applied Arts, ViennaTo combat this feeling of alienation, his art integrates a huge range of sources: not just compositions from classic western and Asian art, but street art, textile patterns from fashion magazines, and corporate logos –‘references and images that bring us all together on an international scale.’ii This creates an art which is spectacularly vivid in its medley of colours and compositions, and beautifully expresses a personal identity -his own- which could not be more strongly defined.
Fittingly enough, this cosmopolitan vision has won him a plaudits and audiences across the art world: earlier this year, he featured in the 60th Venice Biennale, and finished a prominent solo exhibition, MATSUYAMA Tomokazu: Fictional Landscape held at both the Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan and the Powerlong Museum in Shanghai. Besides also enjoying other solo shows with Almine Rech in London and Kavi Gupta in Chicago, his work has been collected by institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Long Museum in China, K11 Art Foundation in Hong Kong, and The Royal Family Collection in the UAE. Born in Gifu in 1976, he currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
i Tomokazu Matsuyama, quoted in Katarina Djoric, 'ART SCENE: TOMOKAZU MATSUYAMA,' Design Scene, 28 April 2016, online.
ii Matsuyama, quoted in Ania Kaczynska, 'Navigating the Complexities of Identity: Interview with Tomokazu Matsuyama,' DailyArt Magazine, 8 April 2024, online.Condition Report
Description
View our Conditions of Sale.
Provenance
Guy Hepner, New York
Private Collection
Phillips, Hong Kong, 29 November 2021, lot 146
Acquired at the above sale by the present ownerExhibited
New York, Joshua Liner Gallery, Tomokazu Matsuyama: East Meets West, 8 September - 8 October 2011
Washington, D.C., Katzen Art Center at American University Museum, Tomokazu Matsuyama: Thousand Regards, 3 April - 20 May 2012, n.p. (illustrated)Literature
Oh Magic Night, exh. cat., HOCA Foundation, Hong Kong, 2017, p. 21 (illustrated, pp. 31, 72)
44
Mrs. Omega
signed, titled and dated '"Mrs. Omega" Tomokazu Matsuyama [in English and Kanji] 7.2011 - 6.2013’ on the reverse
acrylic on canvas
diameter 182 cm. (71 5/8 in.)
Painted in July 2011-June 2013.
Estimate
HK$450,000 - 650,000
€52,000-75,200
$57,700-83,300
Kimberley Wong
Associate Specialist
20th Century & Contemporary Art, Hong Kong
+852 2318 2095
kimberleywong@phillips.com
New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art
Hong Kong Auction 4 October 2024