Born in Tokyo in 1959, Masahiko Kuwahara started exhibiting his work in the 1980s. He has consistently expressed a sense of absurdity with regard to scenery and humanity being changed by modernization. Inorganic buildings and sceneries created by Japan’s economic prosperity during the 1960s and 70s, dolls and toys that were consumed and abandoned to anonymity, and uncanny creatures living by polluted water, are the primary scenery in which Kuwahara himself grew up. He depicts their sadness in light and humorous ways, assimilated with pale color tones and blurred outlines, suggesting our contemporary feelings of fleeting emptiness, dullness, and loneliness, yet also enabling us to sense a mysterious kind of happiness.

Art critic Midori Matsui analyzes the similarity of Kuwahara’s work with the Bad Painting that became popular in the United States in 1997-98.

(Painters of Bad Paintings) thus succeeded in widening the range of contemporary painting by asserting “regional imagination” against the institution of modern painting, while releasing the historical as well as personal “shame” born of repression by strategically adopting the cheapest, most “anonymous” style of popular painting today. Although in a less flagrant way, Kuwahara’s own painting joins with their “aesthetics of the margin”.

(Midori Matsui, “The Unnameable Margin: Masahiko Kuwahara’s Serious ‘Bad Painting’”, exhibition catalogue for “View” at Tomio Koyama Gallery, 1999)

It was in 1995 at the Tokyo Pop exhibition that I first saw Kuwahara’s painting…his “negative pop” style conveyed the shame and sadness of marginal expression exiled from the glittery domain of “major” industrial commodities and Contemporary art, imprinting of “shame” or a minor “evil”.

Kuwahara’s work possesses an uncannily biomorphic feel, suggesting the interior of a body and brain set apart from the “landscape”…This may well be a representation of the physical perception of the subconscious that lies behind the rationally demarcated and explicitly explained “reality.” (Midori Matsui, “Strange=Painting” STUDIO VOICE, August 1999)

This exhibition, “fantasy land”, is Kuwahara’s 10th solo exhibition since “Abandoned Child” in 1997 at Tomio Koyama Gallery, and will feature new and older works encompassing approximately 30 paintings. Kuwahara depicts in witty ways the oddness of the world that we usually overlook. Viewers are invited to see how he expresses desires in contemporary society in 2017. Artist Profile

Masahiko Kuwahara was born in Tokyo in 1959. He has held nine solo exhibitions with Tomio Koyama Gallery: “Abandoned Child” (1997), “View” (1999), “Life and Pus” (2001), “Land Development” (2005), “In the End of Summer” (2007), “Window” (2008), “Sweet and Desserts” (2010), “Only in Dream” (2012), and “Bright Days” (2015). He has also help two solo exhibitions at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, the United States, in 2001 and 2008. His major group exhibitions include “TOKYO POP” (Hiratsuka Museum of Art, Kanagawa, 1996), “The Japanese Experience – Inevitable” (Ursula Blickle Stiftung Foundation, Kraichtal, Germany, 2002; traveled to Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria in 2004), “POPjack: Warhol to Murakami” (Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, 2002), “Japan Pop” (Helsinki City Art Museum, Helsinki, 2005), “Portrait Session” (NADiff, Tokyo / Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, 2007) and “Pathos and Small Narratives” (Gana Art Center, Seoul, Korea, 2011).