Tomokazu Matsuyama

Tomokazu Matsuyama, also known as Matzu, creates energetic pop-inspired artworks that muse on cultural identity in the age of the internet. Having grown up between Japan and America, Matzu explores the personal implications of cross-cultural identity for a globalised generation. His bright, acrylic and mixed media paintings move freely between abstraction and representation, and merge Eastern and Western art histories – from Pop Art, graffiti and Manga to the Edo and Meiji eras, French Renaissance painting and classical Greek and Roman sculpture. Matzu’s canvases are rarely rectangular. Instead, they take on irregular shapes that often suggest the outline of an ancient Japanese scroll. Matzu, like his Japanese colleague Takashi Murakami, also works with multiple artisans to create his works with exceptional levels of technique reminiscent of traditional Japanese painting. Combining domestic motifs like books, plants and furniture with the expressionless faces of his figures, he blends the familiar and the strange in a representation of his own personal identity between two different homes.