Artist to Watch: Tomokazu Matsuyama’s Pop-Infused Canvases Captivate the Art World
The Brooklyn-based Japanese artist is gearing up for a busy year, with upcoming exhibitions at the Edward Hopper House in Nyack, New York, in June and the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, in September
“If you go to an encyclopedic museum like The Met or the Louvre, every single pattern, even a gingham or tartan check, represents a family crest,” says the Brooklyn artist Tomokazu Matsuyama. Within his conceptual practice, he liberally appropriates prints as cultural symbols from seemingly unlike eras and geographies, mixing them together in his intricately detailed, neon-hued paintings. A single composition may reference such disparate sources as the florals of an Edo period kimono, a Baroque wallpaper, and even the familiar circular logo of a Target shopping bag.
Matsuyama’s greatest influence is arguably his longtime home of New York. “To be in the global melting pot really taught me how to be multilinguistic,” says the artist, who moved to the city from Japan in 2002 at the age of 25. To mix the splatters of Abstract Expressionism with the flattened perspective of Japanese woodblock prints is to pay homage to his own dual identity. Following a buzzy booth at Almine Rech at Frieze LA in February, Matsuyama is gearing up for a busy year, with upcoming exhibitions at the Edward Hopper House in Nyack, New York, in June and the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, in September. In his sprawling Greenpoint studio, he manages a full-time team of 30.
Rather than sketch a preliminary composition, he puts his ideas into words, “fragments of sentences,” he says, which he builds out by looking through hundreds of reference images with his research team before moving on to the actual production. Meticulously hand-painted with Japanese and Chinese craft traditions, a single five-foot-square canvas could take months to complete.
“Thank God I didn’t go to art school,” he adds, having studied economics in Tokyo before earning his MFA in communications design at the Pratt Institute. As a self-taught painter, he was able to develop his unusual look and process on his own. “What New York nurtures is the development of a completely new visual vocabulary,” he adds. “Since I had to teach myself how to use these materials, that became my own voice.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Summer Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.