Japanese contemporary artists paintings

Japanese art today is bold, edgy, and adventurous, capturing the spirit of the zeitgeist. Artistic practices across Japan are thrillingly eclectic and diverse, responding intuitively and creatively to the ever-changing climate of Japan in an increasingly globalized world. Japan has a long history of artistic innovation. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, the practice of ukiyo-e woodblock printmaking was at the center of Japanese visual culture, illustrating a huge array of subjects from beautiful women to actors, landscapes, heroes, and folk-tales, all rendered in a flattened, linear style.

Famous japanese artists 20th century

Themes of nature, religion, and East Asian philosophy were prominent, as demonstrated in the famous Ukiyo-e prints of Katsushika Hokusai that illustrate the vast and enduring presence of the Japanese landscape and Mount Fuji. From the late 19th century onwards, Japan began trading with the West, and this shift allowed an exchange of ideas between East and West.

Just as the French Impressionists took inspiration from the bold contours and cropped compositions of Japanese woodblock prints, Japanese artists similarly began emulating modernist ideas, such as oil painting and the portrayal of scenes from ordinary life. In the s, the radical Gutai Group emerged, charging through post-war Japan with rebellious painting performances and multi-media installations that anticipated the happenings of performance art in Europe and the United States.

Their ideas placed Japan at the forefront of contemporary art, and this spirit has continued to evolve and grow ever since, from the subversive and eclectic postmodernism of Yayoi Kusama and Yoko Ono to the Superflat pop styles opened up by Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara. Japanese painter Hiroshi Sugito was trained in the Nihonga tradition, which involves painting with pigments made from naturally derived minerals, rocks, and shells onto sheets of paper.

Although he later moved towards painting with acrylic on canvas, his paintings retain the same light, delicate quality of the Nihonga style, as seen in Pink Water, Sugito first emerged in the s as a younger member of the Superflat generation led by Takashi Murakami, who sought ways of merging Japanese pop culture with fine art.

Sugito translates the imagery of pop culture in a less direct way than many of his contemporaries. Many of her artworks also reference Japanese woodblock prints with brilliantly colorful fabric and eye-catching arrangements of color, as seen in Every Day is a Carnival, Chiharu Shiota makes dazzling, visually arresting installations from yards and yards of humble thread, spread out across vast spaces to form intricate, complex, and all-encompassing webs that are as active and alive as the forces of nature.

Bound into these huge installations are various found objects loaded with their own weight of human history, including keys, book pages, bed frames, and doors. These items have had another life elsewhere before being upcycled into her art.