SHUKADO CONTEMPORARY

Ikenaga Yasunari is a Japanese leading bijinga painter.　Shukado is interviewing with him about his history and future.

Q: What did made you decide to be a painter?
A1: I never have thought I want to become painter. Just I realized I had been born to be a painter when I was 3 years old at the same time of the self-awareness.

Di Qing was born in China　mainland and through Taiwan moved to settle down in Japan. She is the second artist after Chen Pei Yi ( well-known artist for cats paintings) who engaged with our gallery.

What entices us of her paintings is "eroticism ".
When female painters paint a beauty, it may well say that they have tendency of self projections. As it is, it is not necessarily an easy task to express "eroticism".

Her drawing lines are making a whirl, raging, and jumping.
We don’t know where they are dashing to. A figure with a fierce look and animals like birds are depicted in a strange harmony, moving about lively, sometime, with cute gesture and, some other time, with a seemingly intelligent look.

His paintings have something to make people happy to look at them, I thought, attending his solo exhibition at Zokyudo Gallery, feeling myself happy, too.

Last year, the painting of yurei (ghost painting) titled "Darkness" by Toko Okamoto had a powerful spotlight in the "Exhibition of Memento Mori" from the collection of novelist,Ichi Orihara held by Vanilla Gallery in Ginza.

Mr. Orihara kindly contributed an essay titled "Smile of Death-wonders on one painting" to the column of two pages spread on the January issue 2019 of ART Collectors'.

Toko Okamoto has been an escort runner of Yasunari Ikenagawho has led a trend of “beauty painting”. The females she depicts are swaying between hope and despair and her painting figuresas painted by a female artist acquired the sympathy of many people. However, I cannot say yes or no whether the females depicted by her deserve beauty painting or not.

Mr. Hara seems very dandy in my impression, riding over a motorcycle with black leather jacket waving black hair. Yet, what I like most of him, his single minded chivalrous spirit. He is afar from artistic affectation, pride, or narcissism.

The relationship has begun since I just happened to buy his work, “still-life”. To put on his work on our catalog we have contacted him.

A heteromorphic younger beckons from the monochrome screen. "Come here, it's fun," he said. In that jungle, animals, humans and humanoids are living together. A quiet and different world that somehow seems to be nostalgic.

Before becoming a artist, she was a model of several painters, and was also a collector. Although she got employment with suppressing the desire to draw a picture, she could not stop drawing.

As if the genre "cat" was established in the world of painting, pictures of cats are produced one after another in the world. There are plenty of cute pictures of cats. Among them, a Taiwanese painter, Chen Pei Yi's cats are really alive.