Tomokazu Matsuyama was born in Japan, 1976 and currently lives
and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA in
Communications Design from the Pratt Institute, New York.
Matsuyama’s important exhibitions include the Japan Society, New
York; the Harvard University, Massachusetts, the Katzen Arts Center
at American University Museum, Washington D.C., and Museum of
Contemporary Art Museum, Sydney, Australia, among other galleries
and institutions.
His works are in the permanent collections of Asian Art Museum, San
Francisco, the Royal Family, Dubai, UAE, The Standard Hotel (Andre
Balazs Group), the Cosmopolitan Hotel Group, Microsoft Collection
and more. In August 2014 he was awarded the Harbour City Gallery
Public Art Commission in Hong Kong.
Matsuyama’s work responds to his own bi-cultural experience of
growing up between Japan and America by bringing together aspects of
both Eastern and Western aesthetic systems.His practice repositions
traditional icons within a broader global context in order to create
a distinctive style that resists cultural categorization and
embodies what the artist refers to as the “struggle of reckoning the
familiar local with the familiar global.” By raising questions of
national and individual identity through the formal qualities and
subject matter of his paintings, Matsuyama examines the “natural
chaos” of our social environments and challenges viewers to confront
their own conceptions of cultural homogeneity.
Matsuyama is influenced by a variety of subjects, including
Japanese art from the Edo and Meiji eras, classical Greek and Roman
statuary, French Renaissance painting, post-war contemporary art,
and the visual language of global, popular culture as embodied by
mass-produced commodities.