TOMOKAZU MATSUYAMA (JAPAN, B. 1976)

Save Me and Get Yours (Lot 125) was influenced by a painting by a court painter Kanō Sanraku (1559-1635) titled Dog Chasing from the first decades of the Edo Period. Sanraku was adopted into the famed Kanō School family after working for Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the unifier of Japan, and soon became leader of the movement.

Matsuyama gives the work a unique spin by taking the riders from the gilt ground of the original, and places them against expressive floral patterns appropriated by Peonies and Canary and Cuckoo and Azaleas by an ukiyo-e painter Hokusai in the late decades of the Edo Period, with a heavenly snow-filled night sky beyond.

Matsuyama has quite literally taken his inspiration from the important paintings of Japan’s past, from Ukiyo-e, and from a wide variety of Western sources, such as Abstract Expressionist painters of the New York School to create an effect that mimics a gestural approach, with a painstakingly precise technique of layering paint in a very controlled manner.  Matsuyama has blended all of them into a most contemporary amalgamation that very actively erases the boundaries between nations, mindsets, art histories and aesthetic tropes.