SHUKADO CONTEMPORARY

Nakahara Arisa has a magical power. That's the power to see. It is said that Medusa will change the gazer into a stone. She is the reverse. When she see something, she turns into a stone. She sees too much. So it is scary for her to even see eggplants.

Cuteness with Hiroo Suzuki's work are even overload.
Suzuki studied "restoration of art works" at the master course of the Tokyo University of the arts. While dealing with old works, he found out his own view of painting: 'the essence of Japanese art is "humor."'

For us, Okamoto Toko is an artist Ikenaga Yasunari found. Ikenaga was looking for a "fellow" of a painter who painted a so-called beautiful women painting, like him.

Ikenaga is the contemporary painter we have first worked with.
When I met for the first time, he drawed only women with almost self-taught.

Born in 1984, Nakahara Arisa is a young Japanese-style painter who has gained high recognition with her colorful, passionate and dignified woman portraits.

Q: When did you begin to draw woman portraits?

Nakahara: I have been drawing woman portraits since I was little. However it was until college that I started to aware that it could be a subject of a painting.

Japanese-style painter Okamoto Toko will have a solo exhibition in coming October. She also plans to show a large piece in Art Taipei in November. People are getting to pay attention to her amazing works.

A talk between two Japanese-style painters, Abe Kiyoko and Ikenaga yasunari
Yasunari Ikenaga: As far as I am concerned, girls make themselves look like mature adults once at the age of 22.

Composition- the distance between artist and model
Morimoto: Most of your works focuses on the face or the chest, the composition is very impressive. It was like “wow” the first time I ever saw your work.

It was through a site called All About “Nihonga” (Japanese-style painting) which is no longer updated that I came across Yasunari Ikenaga’s work, or the Yubi-school (Yubi means finger in Japanese), in the feature of promising artists.