Image via Complex Original
In today’s futuristic Internet age, art has gone global. Some of the most exciting contemporary art happening right now is coming from Japan—where hyper-cool artists are merging old and new forms, obliterating surfaces, painting superflat, and pushing the limits of technology. Anime and manga influences mingle with Edo-period techniques; cyber-geishas dance through space and reckon with our possible dystopian futures. On the very cutting edge of art, media, and tech, here are 10 Japanese Visual Artists Changing the Game in 2015.
Takehiro Tobinaga
Tobinaga’s deft hand shows in his intricate pencil drawings, which pop with surprising details and masterful, dense composition. In a digital world Tobinaga has not forgotten how to draw—it’s the foundation of his practice. Melding pop culture with art history and fashion, Tobinaga mixes influences, leading to an art style entirely his own. Watch the third episode of Complex Summer Vacation in which our team travelled to one of Japan’s most remote forests to chronicle Tobinaga’s process—radically fusing Japan’s artistic legacy and natural beauty with the rapid accessibility of the Creative Cloud.
Aya Takano
A member of Takashi Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki superflat art collective, Takano, and her dreamy, sensual drawings, create a landscape populated with unexpectedly wistful, mysterious, and wise-looking girls. Much like the characters that inhabit her work, Takano’s paintings seem simple and cute at first, but reveal surprising depth through layers of objects and color.
Mr.
Mr.’s paintings flirt with the boundaries of otaku culture and lolita imagery, depicting anime characters in innocent and not-so-innocent settings. With a wink, Mr. sublimates pop culture desires, allowing us to interpret the work whichever way comes most instinctively—and if that’s with a guilty smile, so be it.
Mariko Mori
Mariko Mori’s art sits at the intersection of life, death, reality, and technology, occupying a cyber esthetic replete with illuminated, luminescent surfaces, alien geishas, and immersive sculpture. Constantly reinventing her work over her decades-long career, Mori is an artist to keep an eye on as we begin to pose new questions about how technology and the Internet impact history in ways we have not yet asked.
Takashi Murakami
We may all be familiar with Takashi Murakami—he has collaborated with the likes of Kanye West, Louis Vuitton and is an iconic figure in the Japanese contemporary art scene. But the originator of superflat and the Kaikai Kiki artist management company isn’t done with us yet. As well as mentoring many of Japan’s most promising young artists—including a few on this list—Murakami continues to create with a prodigious output. We can only guess what’s coming up for him next.
Masakatsu Sashie
Sashie creates a post-industrial fantasia of imagined Japanese landscapes, featuring giant, ominous floating orbs made of the debris of society. Is it a utopia or a dystopia? His work hints at a possible near future, ruled by mysterious moons that might be of human creation.
Yayoi Kusama
Active since the late ’50s, Yayoi Kusama—famous for her dots and infinity nets—continues to dazzle us today. Her recent show at David Zwirner, Give Me Love, featured The Obliteration Room, an interactive manifestation of the hallucinated dots that make up the major motif of Kusama’s work. Her work spans surfaces and space, mixing sculpture, site-specific installation, and painting. We eagerly await what Kusama has in store for us next.
Keiko Masumoto
Keiko Masumoto’s masterful sculptures take their place in a long history of Japanese ceramics. Combining classical forms and imagery like pagodas, fans, and animal and floral drawings, Masumoto creates truly decorative objects that straddle both time and medium. She subverts the old-fashioned nature of her materials with startling formal decisions, lodging a deer in an urn; blooming flowers off the edge of a painted plate.
Ai Yamaguchi
Mixing classical Japanese techniques, like silkscreen and woodcuts, with contemporary, anime-inspired imagery, Ai Yamaguchi portrays the lives of young women prostitutes with tenderness and clarity. Her youthful figures romp through undefined space, evoking both modern-day anime culture and the fluid sexuality of Edo period art.
Heartbeat Sasaki
Conceptual artist Heartbeat Sasaki has been drawing and rendering people’s heartbeats since the late ’90s, constantly finding new ways to depict the unique graph of each person’s heartbeat. The graphs stack and layer to form dizzying, hypnotic, multitudinous images and installations. Sasaki’s work is ongoing—you can even sign up to participate, and add your heartbeat to the art project.