YASUKO HASUMURA (b.1958, Hokkaido, Japan) manipulates Japanese washi paper and sumi ink into a unique abstract expression, capturing air, light or a fleeting instant onto canvas. Hasumura studied oil painting at Tama Art University and contemporary art theory under Lee Ufan. Greatly influenced by her encounter with Noh theatre, which she describes as a “soul-trembling experience,” Hasumura recreates this experience onto canvas

YASUSHI IKEJIRI is a contemporary expressionist influenced by a wide range of landscape painters including Edward Hopper, Peter Doig, and 19th Century Russian masters. Ikejiri draws on mundane scene of everyday life in Tokyo to craft works full of astonishing detail and saturated color. His paintings are in refreshing contrast to the current art market where techniques are overlooked by attention-getting subjects. Ikejiri’s painstaking style and modest choice of subject matter reminds us of the pure, celebratory joy found in landscape paintings.

YUICHI INOUE

HARUOMI IZUMI is a successor of “Nihonga,” the Japanese-style painting which has been practiced over centuries. The word Nihonga was developed as the opposite or counter word, to the word Yo-ga, or Western painting, and is often characterized by the use of traditional materials such as mineral pigments, a binder made of animal glue, washi paper, as well as the choice of subject matter such as nature and animals. Izumi studied Nihonga at Tokyo University of the Arts. Izumi’s signature works, including Yukoku (The Scarlet Hour) and Sokoku (The Blue Hour), depart from traditional Nihonga and combine surreal color with obsessively repetitive patterns of trees. In this way, Izumi creates deeply textured scenes that encompass their surroundings and engulf the viewer with their rich aura.

TOSHIYUKI KAJIOKA (b. 1978 in Tokyo, Japan) has stoically painted the same subject for twenty years: the surface of a flowing river. Working in sumi ink and graphite pencil, he explores the transcendental wildness and tranquility of watery depths.

YAYOI KUSAMA

TOKO SHINODA (1913 - 2021) was one of the world’s oldest practicing artists as well as one of its most accomplished. Having begun her study of calligraphy at the age of six, Shinoda’s work blends traditional Sumi ink painting with modern abstraction which she was exposed to while living in New York City in the 1950s. Her paintings and lithographs are held in numerous esteemed public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Art in Tokyo, the British Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.