Christian Hidaka (b. 1977)

'[Christian] Ward paints psychedelic landscapes that appear fantastical but which have their roots in the real world. For these paintings, he visited Yakushima, a World Heritage site off the southern coast of Japan. Ward translated its mountainous landscape and ancient forests into swirls of luminous colour, mists rolling through abstract suggestions of underground caves and leafy canopies, as strange as the imagined terrain of a distant planet' (Charlotte Mullins (ed), Saatchi Gallery: Loan of Art, London, 2006, p.376).