Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery is pleased to welcome Tomokazu Matsuyama for his 3rd solo show in Luxembourg.

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.

For the exhibition, Matsuyama created new works portraying the diversity of where we live, pointing out the evidence of how one culture can no longer be explained by its lineage of tradition only.
To realize this concept, the artist has mixed various images and appropriations. The interior images were taken from lifestyle magazines or home decor magazines such as Elle Decor, Veranda and other highly circulated home-style magazines, in contrast, the exterior images (tree/forest) were appropriated from traditional Asian painting masterpieces, such as school of Kano, flowers and bird paintings. The images of humans were then taken from other fashion publication from like Vogue amongst others which the artist found in NY newsstands. There are random object and things that are placed within each painting, from 1950’s vintage postcards found on ebay , Andy Warhol paintings to 80 s rock music albums like Guns N Roses or Velvet Underground allowing the viewer to make their own story with their upbringing. The sculpture corresponds to the same approach. The intense superficial smooth finish and gestural accents are inspired by traditional 12th century Japanese wood carved Buddhist sculpture, but the sculpted fashion clipping figure was found in a fashion magazine.

Tomokazu Matsuyama was born in Japan in 1976 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA in Communications Design from Pratt Institute in New York City. Matsuyama recently exhibited work at Lumine 0 in Tokyo, and in the Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery in Luxembourg. He has exhibited at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute, the Asian American Arts Centre in NY, the American University Museum in Washington DC, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Hong Kong Contemporary Art, and galleries, institutions, and art fairs in New York City, Australia, Turkey, Dubai, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Japan, and other locations around the world. His works are in the permanent collections of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Bank of Sharjah in Dubai, The Standard Hotel, the Cosmopolitan Hotel, Microsoft, and more. He was awarded the Harbour City Gallery Public Art Commission in Hong Kong in 2014.