Tomokazu Matsuyama Doubles Down on Decorative Density

When Bijutsu Techo, Japan’s authoritative art journal since 1948, devoted its entire June 2021 issue to Japan-born, Brooklyn-based artist Tomokazu Matsuyama, critics erupted, questioning the decision to spotlight someone they deemed insufficiently Japanese, even inauthentic. Matsuyama studied economics rather than art in Japan, left for New York to pursue graphic design aged 25 and taught himself to paint. He developed his practice outside the traditional hierarchies that validate Japanese artists – the very structures that rejected him.

‘FIRST LAST’, his show at Azabudai Hills Gallery, presents approximately 40 works spanning painting, sculpture and installation. The exhibition takes its name from the Bible verse Matthew 20:16: ‘the last shall be first, and the first last’. In the painting Bring You Home Stratus (2024), Matsuyama merges a traditional Japanese villa with a Beverly Hills courtyard; Baroque figures inhabit this composite space alongside tropical foliage rendered in nihonga, a traditional Japanese style. The massive canvas glows with saturated ceruleans and vivid magentas, its bold outlines and flattened forms generating unsettling spatial tension. Combining one-point, two-point and vertical perspectives, the work creates a visual vertigo that never quite resolves.

In We The People (2025), Matsuyama transposes Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates (1787) to an American supermarket, rendering Socrates receiving poison as a consumer accepting processed food. This painstakingly detailed tableau deploys an almost excessive decorative density, a deliberate maximalism where ornament becomes commentary, achieving what critic Akira Tatehata, in an accompanying catalogue essay, terms ‘centrifugal harmony’, as seemingly disparate elements reference their original contexts while coexisting in new, coherent visual fields.

Walking through the exhibition, viewers must physically negotiate the tension between familiarity and disorientation. Matsuyama positions massive canvases at unexpected angles, some works sprawling across multiple shaped panels that reject conventional framing. Catharsis Metanoia (2024) confronts viewers with its ghostly, semi-transparent rendering of American marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima – a loaded historical reference now floating between Japanese and American domestic interiors, which calls to mind the experience of cultural liminality the artist described to me as ‘being neither here nor there’.

While Matsuyama’s work superficially resembles Superflat aesthetics with its bold outlines, decorative excess, flattened perspectives and pattern-rich surfaces, his approach diverges fundamentally from Takashi Murakami’s movement. Where Superflat is intrinsically oriented toward Japanese postwar culture, Matsuyama casts a wider net. He samples from sources as varied as Renaissance portraiture, Baroque art and American fashion magazines. This hybridity is further complicated by Matsuyama’s Christian background, notable in a country where the faith is shared by about 1 percent of the population. His knowledge of Biblical narratives provides him with a visual vocabulary that transcends simple categorization, allowing him to move fluidly between cultural references that might otherwise seem at odds.

Whereas earlier paintings – like those included in his first Japanese solo show, Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art’s ‘Fictional Landscape’ (2023–24) – hinted at Christian symbolism through oblique Renaissance references, these new works engage explicitly with Biblical narrative. Here, pastoral scenes feature religious figures wearing contemporary streetwear – saints in Supreme hoodies and apostles in Nike. Matsuyama’s growing comfort with his multicultural identity is reflected by his willingness to merge seemingly incompatible visual traditions.

‘FIRST LAST’ arrives at a pivotal moment when institutions worldwide are reconsidering what constitutes ‘authentic’ cultural expression. The Azabudai Hills show confirms that Japan’s art establishment has, at last, embraced Matsuyama on his own terms. The show rejects the binary thinking that once marginalized him, offering instead a complex conception of cultural identity navigated through visual means. In this sense, Matsuyama’s work feels distinctly contemporary, addressing globalization’s central paradox: the more interconnected we become, the more fiercely we cling to simplified notions of cultural authenticity that never truly existed.

Tomokazu Matsuyama, ‘FIRST LAST’ is on view at Azabudai Hills Gallery, Tokyo, until 11 May

^{Main image: Tomokazu Matsuyama, ‘FIRST LAST’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Azabudai Hills Gallery; photograph: Osamu Sakamoto}