Japanese Artist Tenmyouya Hisashi is Taking Traditions into the Future

Avortex appears on the wood: the intersection of past and present react with a boom. Now, we are in the future. Here, now, samurais battle robots, they play football, and the Japanese Spirit has tinted the sky gold. <h1>A New Japanese Spirit</h1> Nihonga is what the most famous type of Japanese art is called. Nihonga was used during the Meiji period to separate Japanese art from Western-style oil painting. In fact, while Japanese art of the period could be described by its subjects (women, men, landscapes, birds), the main difference was in fact mostly that of contrast with Western traditional painting. In 2001, Hisashi Tenmyouya invented the term “Neo-Nihonga” to describe his work’s synchronism of Nihonga and modern globalisation. This is evident in works such as his RS-78–2 Kabuki-mono (2005), in which he depicted a giant robot dressed in samurai garb and surrounded by a dragon while he aimed an automatic weapon. Kabuki-mono pertains to samurai who did not have a teacher and were recognised for their unusual attire and extravagant equipment. The robot, which is instantly recognisable to a worldwide pop culture audience, is also organically Japanese, as seen by a tattoo of Katsushika Hokusai’s famed The Great Wave on its shoulders. Tenmyouya’s postmodern approach aims to honour the essence of Japanese art by actively positioning it as an important aspect of contemporary global culture. <a href="https://medium.com/counterarts/japanese-artist-tenmyouya-hisashi-is-taking-traditions-into-the-future-5928f1ec215a">Website</a>