Japanese painting. Contemporary Japanese painting

Art and design

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01.02.18 09:02

Today's art scene in Japan is very diverse and provocative: looking at the works of masters from the Land of the Rising Sun, you will think that you have arrived on another planet! Home to innovators who have changed the landscape of the industry on a global scale. Here's a list of 10 contemporary Japanese artists and their creations, from the incredible creatures of Takashi Murakami (who celebrates his birthday today) to the colorful universe of Kusama.

From futuristic worlds to dotted constellations: contemporary Japanese artists

Takashi Murakami: traditionalist and classic

Let's start with the hero of the occasion! Takashi Murakami is one of Japan's most iconic contemporary artists, working on paintings, large-scale sculptures and fashion clothing. Murakami's style is influenced by manga and anime. He is the founder of the Superflat movement, which supports Japanese artistic traditions and the country's post-war culture. Murakami promoted many of his fellow contemporaries, and we will also meet some of them today. “Subcultural” works of Takashi Murakami are presented in the art markets of fashion and art. His provocative My Lonesome Cowboy (1998) was sold in New York at Sotheby's in 2008 for a record $15.2 million. Murakami has collaborated with world famous brands Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton and Issey Miyake.

Quietly Ashima and her surreal universe

A member of the art production company Kaikai Kiki and the Superflat movement (both founded by Takashi Murakami), Chicho Ashima is known for her fantastical cityscapes and strange pop creatures. The artist creates surreal dreams inhabited by demons, ghosts, young beauties, depicted against the backdrop of outlandish nature. Her works are usually large-scale and printed on paper, leather, and plastic. In 2006, this contemporary Japanese artist participated in Art on the Underground in London. She created 17 consecutive arches for the platform - the magical landscape gradually turned from daytime to nighttime, from urban to rural. This miracle bloomed at Gloucester Road tube station.

Chiharu Shima and the endless threads

Another artist, Chiharu Shiota, works on large-scale visual installations for specific landmarks. She was born in Osaka, but now lives in Germany - in Berlin. The central themes of her work are oblivion and memory, dreams and reality, past and present, and also the confrontation of anxiety. Chiharu Shiota's most famous works are impenetrable networks of black thread that envelop a variety of everyday and personal objects, such as old chairs, a wedding dress, a burnt piano. In the summer of 2014, Shiota tied together donated shoes and boots (of which there were more than 300) with strands of red yarn and hung them on hooks. Chiharu's first exhibition in the German capital took place during Berlin Art Week in 2016 and caused a sensation.

Hey Arakawa: everywhere, nowhere

Hei Arakawa is inspired by states of change, periods of instability, elements of risk, and his installations often symbolize themes of friendship and teamwork. The credo of the contemporary Japanese artist is defined by the performative, indefinite “everywhere, but nowhere.” His creations pop up in unexpected places. In 2013, Arakawa's works were exhibited at the Venice Biennale and in the exhibition of Japanese contemporary art at the Mori Museum of Art (Tokyo). The installation Hawaiian Presence (2014) was a collaboration with New York artist Carissa Rodriguez and was included in the Whitney Biennial. Also in 2014, Arakawa and his brother Tomu, performing as a duo called United Brothers, offered visitors to Frieze London their “work” “The This Soup Taste Ambivalent” with “radioactive” Fukushima daikon root vegetables.

Koki Tanaka: Relationships and Repetitions

In 2015, Koki Tanaka was recognized as “Artist of the Year”. Tanaka explores the shared experience of creativity and imagination, encourages exchange between project participants, and advocates for new rules of collaboration. Its installation in the Japanese pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale consisted of videos of objects that transformed the space into a platform for artistic exchange. The installations of Koki Tanaka (not to be confused with his full namesake actor) illustrate the relationship between objects and actions, for example, the video contains recordings of simple gestures performed with ordinary objects (a knife cutting vegetables, beer being poured into a glass, opening an umbrella). Nothing significant happens, but the obsessive repetition and attention to the smallest details make the viewer appreciate the mundane.

Mariko Mori and streamlined shapes

Another contemporary Japanese artist, Mariko Mori, “conjures” multimedia objects, combining videos, photographs, and objects. She is characterized by a minimalist futuristic vision and sleek surreal forms. A recurring theme in Mori's work is the juxtaposition of Western legend with Western culture. In 2010, Mariko founded the Fau Foundation, an educational cultural non-profit organization, for which she created a series of art installations honoring the six inhabited continents. Most recently, the Foundation's permanent installation "Ring: One with Nature" was erected over a picturesque waterfall in Resende near Rio de Janeiro.

Ryoji Ikeda: sound and video synthesis

Ryoji Ikeda is a new media artist and composer whose work primarily deals with sound in various “raw” states, from sine waves to noise using frequencies at the edge of human hearing. His immersive installations include computer-generated sounds that are visually transformed into video projections or digital patterns. Ikeda's audiovisual art uses scale, light, shadow, volume, electronic sounds and rhythm. The artist's famous test facility consists of five projectors that illuminate an area 28 meters long and 8 meters wide. The setup converts data (text, sounds, photos and movies) into barcodes and binary patterns of ones and zeros.

Tatsuo Miyajima and LED counters

Contemporary Japanese sculptor and installation artist Tatsuo Miyajima uses electrical circuits, videos, computers and other gadgets in his art. Miyajima's core concepts are inspired by humanistic ideas and Buddhist teachings. The LED counters in his installations flash continuously in repetition from 1 to 9, symbolizing the journey from life to death, but avoiding the finality that is represented by 0 (zero never appears in Tatsuo's work). The ubiquitous numbers in grids, towers, and diagrams express Miyajima's interest in ideas of continuity, eternity, connection, and the flow of time and space. Recently, Miyajima's "Arrow of Time" was shown at the inaugural exhibition "Unfinished Thoughts Visible in New York."

Nara Yoshimoto and the evil children

Nara Yoshimoto creates paintings, sculptures, and drawings of children and dogs—subjects that reflect childhood feelings of boredom and frustration and the fierce independence that comes naturally to toddlers. The aesthetic of Yoshimoto's work is reminiscent of traditional book illustrations, a mixture of restless tension and the artist's love of punk rock. In 2011, the Asia Society Museum in New York hosted Yoshimoto's first solo exhibition, entitled “Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody's Fool,” covering the 20-year career of the contemporary Japanese artist. The exhibits were closely related to global youth subcultures and their alienation and protest.

Yayoi Kusama and space growing into strange forms

The amazing creative biography of Yayoi Kusama lasts seven decades. During this time, the amazing Japanese woman managed to study the fields of painting, graphics, collage, sculpture, cinema, engraving, environmental art, installation, as well as literature, fashion and clothing design. Kusama developed a very distinctive style of dot art that has become her trademark. The illusory visions depicted in 88-year-old Kusama's work—where the world appears to be covered in sprawling, outlandish forms—are the result of hallucinations she has experienced since childhood. Rooms with colorful dots and “infinity” mirrors reflecting their clusters are recognizable and cannot be confused with anything else.

If you think that all great artists are in the past, then you have no idea how wrong you are. In this article you will learn about the most famous and talented artists of our time. And, believe me, their works will remain in your memory no less deeply than the works of maestros from past eras.

Wojciech Babski

Wojciech Babski is a contemporary Polish artist. He completed his studies at the Silesian Polytechnic Institute, but associated himself with. Lately he has been painting mainly women. Focuses on the expression of emotions, strives to obtain the greatest possible effect using simple means.

Loves color, but often uses shades of black and gray to achieve the best impression. Not afraid to experiment with different new techniques. Recently, he has been gaining increasing popularity abroad, mainly in the UK, where he successfully sells his works, which can already be found in many private collections. In addition to art, he is interested in cosmology and philosophy. Listens to jazz. Currently lives and works in Katowice.

Warren Chang

Warren Chang is a contemporary American artist. Born in 1957 and raised in Monterey, California, he graduated with honors from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1981, where he received a BFA. Over the next two decades, he worked as an illustrator for various companies in California and New York before embarking on a career as a professional artist in 2009.

His realistic paintings can be divided into two main categories: biographical interior paintings and paintings depicting people at work. His interest in this style of painting dates back to the work of the 16th century artist Johannes Vermeer, and extends to subjects, self-portraits, portraits of family members, friends, students, studio interiors, classrooms and homes. His goal is to create mood and emotion in his realistic paintings through the manipulation of light and the use of muted colors.

Chang became famous after switching to traditional fine arts. Over the past 12 years, he has earned numerous awards and honors, the most prestigious of which is the Master Signature from the Oil Painters of America, the largest oil painting community in the United States. Only one person out of 50 is given the opportunity to receive this award. Warren currently lives in Monterey and works in his studio, and he also teaches (known as a talented teacher) at the San Francisco Academy of Art.

Aurelio Bruni

Aurelio Bruni is an Italian artist. Born in Blair, October 15, 1955. He received a diploma in scenography from the Institute of Art in Spoleto. As an artist, he is self-taught, as he independently “built a house of knowledge” on the foundation laid in school. He began painting in oils at the age of 19. Currently lives and works in Umbria.

Bruni's early paintings are rooted in surrealism, but over time he begins to focus on the proximity of lyrical romanticism and symbolism, enhancing this combination with the exquisite sophistication and purity of his characters. Animated and inanimate objects acquire equal dignity and look almost hyper-realistic, but at the same time they do not hide behind a curtain, but allow you to see the essence of your soul. Versatility and sophistication, sensuality and loneliness, thoughtfulness and fruitfulness are the spirit of Aurelio Bruni, nourished by the splendor of art and the harmony of music.

Aleksander Balos

Alkasander Balos is a contemporary Polish artist specializing in oil painting. Born in 1970 in Gliwice, Poland, but since 1989 he has lived and worked in the USA, in Shasta, California.

As a child, he studied art under the guidance of his father Jan, a self-taught artist and sculptor, so from an early age, artistic activity received the full support of both parents. In 1989, at the age of eighteen, Balos left Poland for the United States, where his school teacher and part-time artist Cathy Gaggliardi encouraged Alkasander to enroll in art school. Balos then received a full scholarship to the University of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he studied painting with philosophy professor Harry Rozin.

After graduating in 1995 with a bachelor's degree, Balos moved to Chicago to study at the School of Fine Arts, whose methods are based on the work of Jacques-Louis David. Figurative realism and portraiture formed the majority of Balos' work in the 90s and early 2000s. Today, Balos uses the human figure to highlight the characteristics and shortcomings of human existence, without offering any solutions.

The subject compositions of his paintings are intended to be independently interpreted by the viewer, only then will the paintings acquire their true temporal and subjective meaning. In 2005, the artist moved to Northern California, since then the subject matter of his work has expanded significantly and now includes freer painting methods, including abstraction and various multimedia styles that help express ideas and ideals of existence through painting.

Alyssa Monks

Alyssa Monks is a contemporary American artist. Born in 1977, in Ridgewood, New Jersey. I began to be interested in painting when I was still a child. She studied at The New School in New York and Montclair State University, and graduated from Boston College in 1999 with a bachelor's degree. At the same time, she studied painting at the Lorenzo de' Medici Academy in Florence.

Then she continued her studies in the master's degree program at the New York Academy of Art, in the department of Figurative Art, graduating in 2001. She graduated from Fullerton College in 2006. For some time she lectured at universities and educational institutions throughout the country, teaching painting at the New York Academy of Art, as well as Montclair State University and Lyme Academy of Art College.

“Using filters such as glass, vinyl, water and steam, I distort the human body. These filters allow you to create large areas of abstract design, with islands of color peeking through - parts of the human body.

My paintings change the modern view of the already established, traditional poses and gestures of bathing women. They could tell an attentive viewer a lot about such seemingly self-evident things as the benefits of swimming, dancing, and so on. My characters press themselves against the glass of the shower window, distorting their own bodies, realizing that they thereby influence the notorious male gaze on a naked woman. Thick layers of paint are mixed to imitate glass, steam, water and flesh from afar. However, up close, the amazing physical properties of oil paint become apparent. By experimenting with layers of paint and color, I find a point where abstract brushstrokes become something else.

When I first started painting the human body, I was immediately fascinated and even obsessed with it and believed that I had to make my paintings as realistic as possible. I “professed” realism until it began to unravel and reveal contradictions in itself. I am now exploring the possibilities and potential of a style of painting where representational painting and abstraction meet – if both styles can coexist at the same moment in time, I will do so.”

Antonio Finelli

Italian artist – “ Time Observer” – Antonio Finelli was born on February 23, 1985. Currently lives and works in Italy between Rome and Campobasso. His works have been exhibited in several galleries in Italy and abroad: Rome, Florence, Novara, Genoa, Palermo, Istanbul, Ankara, New York, and can also be found in private and public collections.

Pencil drawings " Time Observer“Antonio Finelli takes us on an eternal journey through the inner world of human temporality and the associated scrupulous analysis of this world, the main element of which is the passage through time and the traces it leaves on the skin.

Finelli paints portraits of people of any age, gender and nationality, whose facial expressions indicate passage through time, and the artist also hopes to find evidence of the mercilessness of time on the bodies of his characters. Antonio defines his works with one, general title: “Self-portrait”, because in his pencil drawings he not only depicts a person, but allows the viewer to contemplate the real results of the passage of time inside a person.

Flaminia Carloni

Flaminia Carloni is a 37-year-old Italian artist, the daughter of a diplomat. She has three children. She lived in Rome for twelve years, and for three years in England and France. She received a degree in art history from the BD School of Art. Then she received a diploma as an art restorer. Before finding her calling and devoting herself entirely to painting, she worked as a journalist, colorist, designer, and actress.

Flaminia's passion for painting arose in childhood. Her main medium is oil because she loves to “coiffer la pate” and also play with the material. She recognized a similar technique in the works of artist Pascal Torua. Flaminia is inspired by great masters of painting such as Balthus, Hopper, and François Legrand, as well as various artistic movements: street art, Chinese realism, surrealism and Renaissance realism. Her favorite artist is Caravaggio. Her dream is to discover the therapeutic power of art.

Denis Chernov

Denis Chernov is a talented Ukrainian artist, born in 1978 in Sambir, Lviv region, Ukraine. After graduating from the Kharkov Art School in 1998, he remained in Kharkov, where he currently lives and works. He also studied at the Kharkov State Academy of Design and Arts, Department of Graphic Arts, graduating in 2004.

He regularly participates in art exhibitions; at the moment there have been more than sixty of them, both in Ukraine and abroad. Most of Denis Chernov's works are kept in private collections in Ukraine, Russia, Italy, England, Spain, Greece, France, USA, Canada and Japan. Some of the works were sold at Christie's.

Denis works in a wide range of graphic and painting techniques. Pencil drawings are one of his most favorite painting methods; the list of themes in his pencil drawings is also very diverse; he paints landscapes, portraits, nudes, genre compositions, book illustrations, literary and historical reconstructions and fantasies.

Each country has its own heroes of contemporary art, whose names are well-known, whose exhibitions attract crowds of fans and curious people, and whose works are sold to private collections.

In this article we will introduce you to the most popular contemporary artists in Japan.

Keiko Tanabe

Born in Kyoto, Keiko won many art competitions as a child, but her higher education was not in the field of art. She worked in the international relations department of a Japanese municipal trade organization in Tokyo, a large law firm in San Francisco and a private consulting firm in San Diego, and traveled extensively. Starting in 2003, she left her job and, having studied the basics of watercolor painting in San Diego, devoted herself exclusively to art.

Ikenaga Yasunari

Japanese artist Ikenaga Yasunari paints portraits of modern women in the ancient Japanese painting tradition, using a Menso brush, mineral pigments, carbon black, ink and linen as a base. Its characters are women of our time, but thanks to Nihonga's style, you get the feeling that they came to us from time immemorial.

Abe Toshiyuki

Abe Toshiyuki is a realist artist who has perfectly mastered the watercolor technique. Abe can be called an artist-philosopher: he fundamentally does not paint well-known landmarks, preferring subjective compositions that reflect the internal states of the person who observes them.

Hiroko Sakai

The career of artist Hiroko Sakai began in the early 90s in the city of Fukuoka. After graduating from Seinan Gakuin University and the French Nihon School of Interior Design in design and visualization, she founded Atelier Yume-Tsumugi Ltd. and successfully managed this studio for 5 years. Many of her works decorate hospital lobbies, offices of large corporations and some municipal buildings in Japan. After moving to the United States, Hiroko began painting in oils.

Riusuke Fukahori

Riusuki Fukahori's three-dimensional works resemble holograms. They are made with several layers of acrylic paint and transparent resin liquid - all this, without excluding traditional methods such as drawing shadows, softening edges, controlling transparency, allows Riusuki to create sculptural paintings and gives the works depth and realism.

Natsuki Otani

Natsuki Ohtani is a talented Japanese illustrator living and working in England.

Makoto Muramatsu

Makoto Muramatsu chose a win-win theme as the basis for his creativity - he draws cats. His pictures are popular all over the world, especially in the form of puzzles.

Tetsuya Mishima

Most of the paintings by contemporary Japanese artist Mishima are done in oils. She has been painting professionally since the 90s, and has had several solo exhibitions and a large number of collective exhibitions, both Japanese and foreign.

Yayoi Kusama is unlikely to be able to answer what formed the basis of her career as an artist. She is 87 years old, her art is recognized throughout the world. There will soon be major exhibitions of her work in the US and Japan, but she hasn't told the world everything yet. “It’s still on its way. I'm going to create this in the future," Kusama says. She is called the most successful artist in Japan. In addition, she is the most expensive living artist: in 2014, her painting “White No. 28” was sold for $7.1 million.

Kusama lives in Tokyo and has been voluntarily staying in a mental hospital for almost forty years. Once a day she leaves its walls to paint. She gets up at three o'clock in the morning, unable to sleep and wanting to spend her time productively at work. “I'm old now, but I'm still going to create more work and better work. More than I've done in the past. My mind is full of pictures,” she says.

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Yayoi Kusama at an exhibition of his work in London in 1985. Photo: NILS JORGENSEN/REX/Shutterstock

From nine to six, Kusama works in his three-story studio from the comfort of a wheelchair. She can walk, but is too weak. A woman works on canvas laid out on tables or fixed to the floor. The studio is full of new paintings, bright works strewn with small specks. The artist calls this "self-silencing" - endless repetition that drowns out the noise in her head.

Before the 2006 Praemium Imperiale art awards in Tokyo. Photo: Sutton-Hibbert/REX/Shutterstock

A new gallery is opening soon across the street, and another museum of her art is being built north of Tokyo. In addition, two major exhibitions of her work are opening. “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors,” a retrospective of her 65-year career, opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington on February 23 and runs through May 14, before traveling to Seattle, Los Angeles, Toronto and Cleveland. The exhibition includes 60 paintings by Kusama.

Her polka dots cover everything from Louis Vuitton dresses to buses in her hometown. Kusama's work regularly sells for millions of dollars and can be found all over the world, from New York to Amsterdam. Exhibitions of the Japanese artist's works are so popular that measures are required to prevent crowds and riots. For example, in the Hirshhorn, tickets to the exhibition are sold for a certain time in order to somehow regulate the flow of visitors.

Presentation of the joint design of Louis Vuitton and Yayoi Kusama in New York in 2012. Photo: Billy Farrell Agency/REX/Shutterstock

But Kusama still needs outside approval. When asked in an interview whether she achieved her goal of becoming rich and famous decades ago, she said in surprise: “When I was little, I had a very hard time convincing my mother that I wanted to become an artist. Is it really true that I'm rich and famous?

Kusama was born in Matsumoto, in the mountains of central Japan, in 1929 into a wealthy and conservative family that sold seedlings. But it was not a happy home. Her mother despised her cheating husband and sent little Kusama to spy on him. The girl saw her father with other women, and this gave her a lifelong aversion to sex.

Louis Vuitton boutique window designed by Kusama in 2012. Photo: Joe Schildhorn/BFA/REX/Shutterstock

As a child, she began experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations. The first time she saw the pumpkin, she imagined that it was talking to her. The future artist coped with the visions by creating repeating patterns to drown out the thoughts in her head. Even at such a young age, art became a kind of therapy for her, which she would later call “art medicine.”

Work by Yayoi Kusama on display at the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012. Photo: Billy Farrell Agency/REX/Shutterstock

Kusama's mother was strongly opposed to her daughter's desire to become an artist and insisted that the girl follow the traditional path. “She wouldn’t let me draw. She wanted me to get married,” the artist said in an interview. - She threw away my work. I wanted to throw myself under a train. Every day I fought with my mother, and therefore my mind was damaged.”

In 1948, after the end of the war, Kusama went to Kyoto to study traditional Japanese nihonga painting with strict rules. She hated this type of art.

One of the exhibits from the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012. Photo: Billy Farrell Agency/REX/Shutterstock

When Kusama lived in Matsumoto, she found a book by Georgia O'Keeffe and was amazed by its paintings. The girl went to the American embassy in Tokyo to find an article about O’Keefe in the directory there and find out her address. Kusama wrote her a letter and sent her some drawings, and to her surprise, the American artist replied to her.

“I couldn’t believe my luck! She was so kind that she responded to the sudden outburst of feelings of a modest Japanese girl whom she had never met in her life and had never even heard of,” the artist wrote in her autobiography “Infinity Net.”

Yayoi Kusama in her Louis Vuitton boutique window display in New York in 2012. Photo: Nils Jorgensen/REX/Shutterstock

Despite O'Keeffe's warnings that life was very difficult for young artists in the United States, not to mention single young girls in Japan, Kusama was unstoppable. In 1957, she managed to obtain a passport and visa. She sewed dollars into her dresses to circumvent strict post-war currency controls.

The first stop was Seattle, where she held an exhibition in a small gallery. Then Kusama went to New York, where she was bitterly disappointed. “Unlike post-war Matsumoto, New York was in every sense an evil and violent place. It turned out to be too stressful for me, and I soon became mired in neurosis.” To make matters worse, Kusama found herself in complete poverty. An old door served as her bed, and she fished fish heads and rotten vegetables from trash cans to make soup from.

Installation Infinity Mirror Room - Love Forever (“Room with infinity mirrors - love forever”). Photo: Tony Kyriacou/REX/Shutterstock

This difficult situation prompted Kusama to immerse himself in his work even more. She began creating her first paintings in the Infinity Net series, covering huge canvases (one of them was 10 meters high) with mesmerizing waves of small loops that seemed to never end. The artist herself described them as follows: “White networks enveloping the black dots of silent death against the backdrop of the hopeless darkness of nothingness.”

Installation by Yayoi Kusama at the opening of the new building of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art at the Gorky Central Park of Culture and Culture in Moscow in 2015. Photo: David X Prutting/BFA.com/REX/Shutterstock

This obsessive-compulsive repetition helped drive away the neurosis, but it did not always save. Kusama constantly suffered from bouts of psychosis and ended up in a New York hospital. Ambitious and determined, and happily accepting the role of an exotic Asian woman in a kimono, she joined the circle of influential people in the arts and associated with such recognized artists as Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol. Kusama later said that Warhol imitated her work.

Kusama soon gained a degree of fame and exhibited in crowded galleries. In addition, the artist’s fame became scandalous.

In the 1960s, while Kusama was obsessed with polka dots, she began staging happenings in New York City, encouraging people to strip naked in places like Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge and painting their bodies with polka dots.

Pre-display at Art Basel in Hong Kong in 2013. Photo: Billy Farrell/BFA/REX/Shutterstock

Decades before the Occupy Wall Street movement, Kusama staged a happening in New York's financial district, declaring that she wanted to "destroy the men of Wall Street with polka dots." Around this time, she began to cover various objects - a chair, a boat, a stroller - with phallic-looking protuberances. “I began creating penises to cure my feelings of aversion to sex,” the artist wrote, describing how this creative process gradually turned the terrible into something familiar.

Installation "Passing Winter" at the Tate Gallery in London. Photo: James Gourley/REX/Shutterstock

Kusama never married, although she had a marriage-like relationship with artist Joseph Cornell for ten years while living in New York. “I didn’t like sex, and he was impotent, so we suited each other very well,” she said in an interview with Art Magazine.

Kusama became increasingly famous for her antics: she offered to sleep with US President Richard Nixon if he would end the war in Vietnam. “Let's decorate each other with polka dots,” she wrote to him in a letter. Interest in her art itself faded away, she found herself out of favor, and money problems began again.

Yayoi Kusama during a retrospective of her work at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2012. Photo: Steve Eichner/Penske Media/REX/Shutterstock

News of Kusama's escapades reached Japan. They began to call her a “national disaster,” and her mother said that it would be better if her daughter died of the disease in childhood. In the early 1970s, impoverished and failed, Kusama returned to Japan. She registered in a psychiatric hospital, where she still lives, and sank into artistic obscurity.

In 1989, the Center for Contemporary Art in New York staged a retrospective of her work. This was the beginning, albeit slow, of a revival of interest in Kusama’s art. She filled a mirrored room with pumpkins for an installation that was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and had a major exhibition at MoMa in New York in 1998. This is where she once staged a happening.

At the exhibition My Eternal Soul at the National Art Center in Tokyo, February 2017. Photo: Masatoshi Okauchi/REX/Shutterstock

Over the past few years, Yayoi Kusama has become an international phenomenon. The Tate Modern Gallery in London and the Whitney Museum in New York held major retrospectives that attracted huge crowds of visitors, and its iconic polka dot pattern became highly recognizable.

At the exhibition My Eternal Soul at the National Art Center in Tokyo, February 2017. Photo: Masatoshi Okauchi/REX/Shutterstock

The artist has no plans to stop working, but has begun to think about her mortality. “I don’t know how long I can survive even after death. There is a future generation that follows in my footsteps. It would be an honor for me if people enjoy looking at my work and if they are moved by my art.”

At the exhibition My Eternal Soul at the National Art Center in Tokyo, February 2017. Photo: Masatoshi Okauchi/REX/Shutterstock

Despite the commercialization of her art, Kusama thinks about the grave in Matsumoto - not in the family crypt, she inherited it from her parents anyway - and how not to turn it into a shrine. “But I’m not dying yet. I think I will live another 20 years,” she says.

At the exhibition My Eternal Soul at the National Art Center in Tokyo, February 2017. Photo: Masatoshi Okauchi/REX/Shutterstock

Has a very rich history; its tradition is vast, with Japan's unique position in the world greatly influencing the dominant styles and techniques of Japanese artists. It is a well-known fact that Japan has been quite isolated for many centuries, due not only to geography, but also to the dominant Japanese cultural tendency toward isolation that has marked the country's history. During the centuries of what we might call “Japanese civilization,” culture and art developed separately from those in the rest of the world. And this is even noticeable in the practice of Japanese painting. For example, Nihonga paintings are among the main works of Japanese painting practice. It is based on over a thousand years of tradition, and the paintings are usually created with brushes on either Vashi (Japanese paper) or Egina (silk).

However, Japanese art and painting have been influenced by foreign artistic practices. First, it was Chinese art in the 16th century and Chinese painting and the Chinese art tradition, which was particularly influential in several aspects. As of the 17th century, Japanese painting was also influenced by Western traditions. In particular, during the pre-war period, which lasted from 1868 to 1945, Japanese painting was influenced by impressionism and European romanticism. At the same time, new European artistic movements were also significantly influenced by Japanese artistic techniques. In art history, this influence is called "Japaneseism", and it is especially significant for the Impressionists, Cubists and artists associated with modernism.

The long history of Japanese painting can be seen as a synthesis of several traditions that create parts of a recognized Japanese aesthetic. First of all, Buddhist art and painting methods, as well as religious painting, left a significant mark on the aesthetics of Japanese paintings; water-ink painting of landscapes in the tradition of Chinese literary painting is another important element recognized in many famous Japanese paintings; paintings of animals and plants, especially birds and flowers, are what are commonly associated with Japanese compositions, as are landscapes and scenes from everyday life. Finally, ancient ideas about beauty from the philosophy and culture of Ancient Japan had a great influence on Japanese painting. Wabi, which means transient and rugged beauty, sabi (the beauty of natural patina and aging), and yugen (deep grace and subtlety) continue to influence ideals in the practice of Japanese painting.

Finally, if we concentrate on selecting the ten most famous Japanese masterpieces, we must mention ukiyo-e, which is one of the most popular genres of art in Japan, even though it belongs to printmaking. It dominated Japanese art from the 17th to 19th centuries, with artists belonging to this genre creating woodcuts and paintings of such subjects as beautiful girls, Kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers, as well as scenes from history and folk tales, travel scenes and landscapes. flora and fauna and even erotica.

It is always difficult to compile a list of the best paintings from artistic traditions. Many amazing works will be excluded; however, this list features ten of the most recognizable Japanese paintings in the world. This article will present only paintings created from the 19th century to the present day.

Japanese painting has an extremely rich history. Over the centuries, Japanese artists have developed a large number of unique techniques and styles that are Japan's most valuable contribution to the world of art. One of these techniques is sumi-e. Sumi-e literally means "ink drawing" and combines calligraphy and ink painting to create a rare beauty of brush-drawn compositions. This beauty is paradoxical - ancient yet modern, simple yet complex, bold yet subdued, undoubtedly reflecting the spiritual basis of art in Zen Buddhism. Buddhist priests introduced solid ink blocks and bamboo brushes to Japan from China in the sixth century, and over the past 14 centuries Japan has developed a rich heritage of ink painting.

Scroll down and see 10 Japanese Painting Masterpieces

1. Katsushika Hokusai “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife”

One of the most recognizable Japanese paintings is “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife.” It was painted in 1814 by the famous artist Hokusai. By strict definition, this amazing work by Hokusai cannot be considered a painting, as it is a woodcut of the ukiyo-e genre from the book Young Pines (Kinoe no Komatsu), which is a three-volume shunga book. The composition depicts a young ama diver entwined sexually with a pair of octopuses. This image was very influential in the 19th and 20th centuries. The work influenced later artists such as Félicien Rops, Auguste Rodin, Louis Aucock, Fernand Knopff and Pablo Picasso.

2. Tessai Tomioka “Abe no Nakamaro writes a nostalgic poem while watching the moon”

Tessai Tomioka is the pseudonym of a famous Japanese artist and calligrapher. He is considered the last major artist in the bunjing tradition and one of the first major artists of the Nihonga style. Bunjinga was a school of Japanese painting that flourished in the late Edo era among artists who considered themselves literati or intellectuals. Each of these artists, including Tessaya, developed their own style and technique, but they were all great admirers of Chinese art and culture.

3. Fujishima Takeji “Sunrise over the Eastern Sea”

Fujishima Takeji was a Japanese artist known for his work in developing Romanticism and Impressionism in the yoga (Western style) art movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1905, he traveled to France, where he was influenced by the French movements of the time, particularly Impressionism, as can be seen in his painting Sunrise over the Eastern Sea, which was painted in 1932.

4. Kitagawa Utamaro “Ten types of female faces, a collection of ruling beauties”

Kitagawa Utamaro was a prominent Japanese artist who was born in 1753 and died in 1806. He is certainly best known for a series called “Ten Types of Women's Faces. A Collection of Dominant Beauties, Great Love Themes of Classical Poetry" (sometimes called "Women in Love", containing separate engravings "Naked Love" and "Thoughtful Love"). He is one of the most important artists belonging to the ukiyo-e woodcut genre.

5. Kawanabe Kyosai “Tiger”

Kawanabe Kyosai was one of the most famous Japanese artists of the Edo period. His art was influenced by the work of Tohaku, a 16th-century Kano school painter who was the only artist of his time to paint screens entirely in ink on a delicate background of powdered gold. Although known as a cartoonist, Kyōsai painted some of the most famous paintings in 19th-century Japanese art history. "Tiger" is one of those paintings that Kyosai used watercolor and ink to create.

6. Hiroshi Yoshida “Fuji from Lake Kawaguchi”

Hiroshi Yoshida is known as one of the major figures of the Shin-hanga style (Shin-hanga is an artistic movement in Japan in the early 20th century, during the Taisho and Showa periods, which revived the traditional art of ukiyo-e, which had its roots in the Edo and Meiji periods (XVII - XIX centuries)). He trained in the tradition of Western oil painting, which was adopted from Japan during the Meiji period.

7. Takashi Murakami “727”

Takashi Murakami is probably the most popular Japanese artist of our time. His works sell for astronomical prices at major auctions, and his work is already inspiring new generations of artists not only in Japan, but also abroad. Murakami's art includes a range of mediums and is usually described as superflat. His work is known for his use of color, incorporating motifs from Japanese traditional and popular culture. The content of his paintings is often described as "cute", "psychedelic" or "satirical".

8. Yayoi Kusama “Pumpkin”

Yaoi Kusama is also one of the most famous Japanese artists. She creates in a variety of media including painting, collage, scat sculpture, performance, environmental art and installation, most of which demonstrate her thematic interest in psychedelic colour, repetition and pattern. One of the most famous series of this great artist is the “Pumpkin” series. Covered in a polka dot pattern, a regular pumpkin in bright yellow is presented against a net background. Collectively, all such elements form a visual language that is unmistakably true to the artist's style, and has been developed and refined over decades of painstaking production and reproduction.

9. Tenmyoya Hisashi “Japanese Spirit No. 14”

Tenmyoya Hisashi is a contemporary Japanese artist who is known for his neo-nihonga paintings. He participated in the revival of the old tradition of Japanese painting, which is the complete opposite of modern Japanese painting. In 2000, he also created his new butouha style, which demonstrates a strong attitude towards the authoritative art system through his paintings. "Japanese Spirit No. 14" was created as part of the "BASARA" artistic scheme, interpreted in Japanese culture as the rebellious behavior of the lower aristocracy during the Warring States period, to deny those in power the ability to achieve an ideal lifestyle by dressing in opulent and luxurious clothing and acting freely. will that did not correspond to their social class.

10. Katsushika Hokusai “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa”

Finally, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa is probably the most recognizable Japanese painting ever painted. It is actually the most famous piece of art created in Japan. It depicts huge waves threatening boats off the coast of Kanagawa Prefecture. Although sometimes mistaken for a tsunami, the wave, as the painting's title suggests, is most likely simply abnormally high. The painting is made in the ukiyo-e tradition.