Neo Japan Pop Art Explored - Catalogue
Neo Japan Pop Art Explored - Catalogue
Neo Japan Pop Art Explored - Catalogue
2 – 8 August 2023
Artspace@Helutrans , Singapore
www.onfinitiveart.com
Onfinitive Project proudly announces Neo Japan: Pop Art Explored, a group show
The concept of the show originates from the Japanese word “NIJIGEN” (literally
trend”). The term has come to mean various “Japanese things” that one would
typically associate with Japanese games and animation but also distinctive
influences from Japan's innovative fashion and design industry. Additionally, this
By bringing these young Japanese artists to Singapore and positioning them next
market.
About Onfinitive Project
Onfinitive Project was conceived and founded by Hong Kong-based, Beijing-native
collector Ms. Chloe Chiu. Ms. Chiu has been supporting and collecting Japanese art
for over a decade. The Singapore exhibition is a continuation of her engagement in
art scene having previously shown parts of her collection at UCCA in Beijing in
2015 and at the art fair ART021 in Shanghai as well as at M Woods' opening in
Beijing in 2014. More recently, she sat on M+ Museum's International Council for
Visual Art in Hong Kong from 2021 to 2023.
Previously based in Shanghai but now residing in Japan, BYNAM is a Japanese-born Korean artist
whose activities are not limited to painting, but cover a wide range of fields such as architecture
and digital art. By immersing himself in the company of others with different nationalities,
specialties, and cultural and ideological backgrounds, he has come to recognize the absolute
distance that separates himself from others, as well as the comfort and relief of being buried and
assimilated into the crowd.
Many people can relate to the uncertainty of being unable to clearly grasp the essence of the
other person, no matter how close the physical distance is. The more visual images propagate,
the more they obscure the nature and essence of the individual, especially in today's world
where large numbers of digital images are copied and pasted endlessly via the Internet. Just as
Andy Warhol used Marilyn Monroe's visual images to create his works after her death, BYNAM
blurs the public image of deceased pop stars by creating mosaic portraits of them, thereby
homogenizing them as mere people within the rest of the population.
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 3,000
BYNAM
SGD 8,500
Hiromi (b.1989)
Hiromi's landscapes are like daydreams. The disaster-stricken terrains are depicted in unnamed
landscapes of yards, intersections, and residential areas. The plants that cover the scenery with
their branches, leaves, and stark growth are a powerful life force that regenerates and
reproduces itself in a completely different order than the social norms set by humans and the
twists and turns that occur in such a society. While pretty flowers bloom, ivy crawls like
capillaries on the walls and weeds grow inexhaustibly in the garden, showing that beauty and
grotesqueness are inextricably linked. The characters floating and flashing in the landscape
seem to be loosely assimilated and connected to the plants. These characters can be symbols of
longing, ideals, memories, and nostalgia, or they can be divine figures that embody the
familiarity and awe that Japanese people have felt toward all things since ancient times.
However, the character divided into fragmented images and mosaicked in places cannot be
clearly seen no matter how hard one looks. The chaotic landscape seems to be the unstable
vision of modern people who are exposed to vast amounts of information every day and who
continue to process complex social rules and human relationships. Nevertheless, we cannot help
but gaze at it, perhaps because we feel that there is something important hidden in the
landscape that we have somehow left behind in our memories.
Hiromi
SGD 17,500
Hiromi
SGD 17,500
Hiromi
Enbu, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
60×60×8 cm
SGD 6,000
ROOO Lou (b.1988)
The face is a device that is used to distinguish one from others and is also the most easily
understood symbol of identity. Since long ago, people have considered the face and facial
expressions as special parts of the human body and have experimented with how to depict
them, sometimes hiding faces to express anonymity and universality.
Rooo Lou's minimal lines and pleasant colors depict a variety of people, young and old, male and
female, but their faces have no noses or mouths. By simplifying facial forms to the utmost limit,
he arbitrarily reduces the joy, anger, sorrow, and hidden thoughts that human expressions bring
about, and lightly expresses the beauty of the human form. The figurative expression of the
human form as a simple line is pop, but it is distinct from characters that are entrusted with
emotions and narratives. His practice comes after working as a designer before shifting to
illustration and working on various corporate goods and advertisements.
While Rooo's characters have no facial expressions, they wear a wide variety of fashion and
hairstyles and are imbued with the real-time zeitgeist and the scent of a sophisticated city. They
are like mirrors, so to speak, and their expressions can change freely into smiling or crying faces
as the viewer changes. These figures may even transform into someone the viewer admires or
someone close to them.
Rooo Lou
GO, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
100 x 80.3 cm
SGD 5,500
Rooo Lou
SGD 5,500
Rooo Lou
SGD 4,500
Rooo Lou
Unreachable, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
72.7 x 91 cm
SGD 4,500
Rooo Lou
Vague, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
72.7 x 91 cm
SGD 4,500
Kojiro MATSUMOTO (b. 1976)
What is talent?
Kojiro Matsumoto, a graduate of Japan's Tama Art University Graduate School of Fine Arts, says
openly about himself, "I have no talent. I doubt my sense of taste and individuality. I don't like
art in the first place, and I don't think I am suited for it." So, what exactly is talent? How do we,
who are constantly confronted with outstanding artists, think we are in touch with their talent,
have faith in it and continue to be swayed by it, actually draw the line between the existence of
talent and the absence of talent?
Kojiro Matsumoto's works are made of clear allusions and reconstructions. He draws on
characters and motif designs from Osamu Tezuka's manga, animated robots, Japanese paintings,
fashion items, etc., and ties them together, recomposing them into new works. This is a direct
antithesis to the original historicism that regards the creation of something out of nothing as art.
While depicting young girls and creatures with manga-like looks in his works, he constructs his
worldview by interweaving the techniques and compositions of Japanese painting, which he
acquired through his art education in Japan, with the expressive methods seen in the pictures of
manga.
Matsumoto uses the words "quotation" and "imitation" to describe his own expression. His
world, which is like a broken time machine combining motifs from different eras, wears a
strange charm that only he can express. His method of repeatedly introducing the same motifs,
characters and color schemes while updating them with slight changes each time seems like he
is constantly testing himself to see how much he can refine his expression within the set of
restrictive rules he has deliberately imposed upon himself.
Kojiro MATSUMOTO
Untitled, 2023
Pencil acrylic on canvas
42.5 x 30.0 cm
SGD 2,600
Kojiro MATSUMOTO
Untitled, 2023
Pencil acrylic on canvas
30.5 x 30.5 cm
SGD 2,500
Kojiro MATSUMOTO
Untitled, 2023
Pencil acrylic on canvas
100.3 x 100.3 cm
SGD 10,000
Kojiro MATSUMOTO
Untitled, 2023
Pencil acrylic on canvas
100.3 x 100.3 cm
SGD 10,000
Shigeki MATSUYAMA (b. 1973)
Having worked as an illustrator since 1998, Shigeki Matsuyama began his career as an artist in
2011. He has created numerous conceptual installations that capture contemporary society and
people living today and has exhibited them at galleries in Japan and abroad. More recently, he
has developed the same theme by creating portraits using dazzle camouflage.
The bizarre black-and-white camouflage was originally used on naval vessels during World War I
as protection from enemy attacks, making it difficult to see the ship's direction of travel and
perspective even though its shadow remained clearly visible. Matsuyama's imagery using this
illusion overlaps with its military origins in respect to the way people today communicate on
social network sites by cropping only the part of the image they want to show, reshaping and
confounding the reality of the moment.
The desire to make oneself look better and the exaggerated expressions that fulfils this desire
are fundamental to the egoism latent in portraits, which remains unchanged even today.
Matsuyama traces only the eyes from a selfie of a real person uploaded on the Internet as a
suitable representation of contemporary portraits of people. The contemporaneousness of the
work, created through a performance that can be described as a communication between the
anonymous model and the artist using digital tools, and the universal human desire that is
implicit in the portraits are the appeal of his work, calling for people's sympathy.
Shigeki MATSUYAMA
SGD 21,000
Shigeki MATSUYAMA
SGD 24,000
Shigeki MATSUYAMA
SGD 19,000
Shigeki MATSUYAMA
SGD 21,000
Shigeki MATSUYAMA
SGD 6,000
Shigeki MATSUYAMA
SGD 6,000
Erika NAKA (b. 1994)
Erika Naka's works, such as the logo of Uber Eats and limited-time-only Starbucks Coffee menu
items, are painted with thick acrylic paints, picking up symbols hidden in daily life as traces of
the times.
The symbols, which are encountered casually in the day-to-day, contain images and meanings
shared unconsciously by the people of that era. At the same time, however, the fast-changing
flow of time is transforming and erasing various things that we take for granted, such as the
shape of a town, the values of the people living there, and trends. Someday, the "F" logo of
Facebook may be recognized as nothing more than a roman letter "F". As such, for Naka, it is
important to consider how the work will look in 10 or even 20 years from now.
How people will perceive the work in the future and the gap in perception that gradually arises
between the motif and the viewer is a central element of the work's composition. Naka's
characteristic thick paint application is an act that creates a gap between the support and the
artist, suggesting a deviation and divergence from the original meaning of the motif. The
"displacement" that dismantles the meaning of the symbols that serve as motifs has the
potential to reinterpret the meaning and timelessness of things and to connect the past and
present in a transversal manner.
The motifs of the works are selected from what the artist actually saw at that time and place
and are recorded as fragments of personal experiences and memories, like a diary. Naka's
works, which respond to the environment and the nature of the place, can be seen as a kind of
installation. The novelty of her pictorial expression is also noteworthy.
Erika NAKA
SGD 20,000
Erika NAKA
G, 2023
Acrylic on panel
100 × 100 cm
SGD 12,500
Bell NAKAI (b. 1984)
Bell Nakai began creating self-taught contemporary art in 2019, and her art career took
off when her art caught the attention of collectors on social media. Originally from
Thailand but now based in Japan, with her pop fashion sensibilities and innocent
appearance, her expression reveals an aura of undeniable cool.
Many people lose the ability to express their feelings of joy, sadness, and anger as they
grow older, although they were once able to do so honestly as children. For Nakai, the
reoccurring girl is a character that reflects her own life and the lives of those close to her
and is a presence that stands by adults who have lost this freedom of expression. Her
portraits show a young girl who suppresses her negative feelings of frustration, anger,
and anxiety and acts in a cheerful manner, wearing large pink sunglasses as a mask to
hide her true feelings.
The themes of Nakai's work range from war and peace, NFTs, and virtual reality, all of
which are very much topics of the times, to the complex feelings of being told to “Be a
good girl,” which are expressed in the obedient dog and the phrase, “We are good
boys.” Her work also features Nakai's own daily life and the things she sees, hears, and
feels. Based on the Japanese original shoujo manga (girls' manga) and pop culture
motifs, she expresses a world view in which cuteness and suffocation coexist. The world
is presented in a simple and realistic manner, incorporating appropriation techniques.
Bell NAKAI
SGD 1,200
Bell NAKAI
SGD 6,000
Bell NAKAI
Smiley, 2023
Acrylic painting on canvas
100 x 80 cm
SGD 6,000
Bell NAKAI
SGD 11,000
Bell NAKAI
SGD 1,200
Hiromi NIIMI (b. 1985)
We who live in the modern age are constantly bombarded with vast amounts of information on
a daily basis. The lifespan of web ads and content is short, and we create and consume new
creative works one after another while cycling through the PDCA, or plan–do–check–act,
process. Niimi is an artist who uses particularly fast-consuming items as his motifs, such as past
works left behind in manga, ads, and on the web, and his career as an art director in advertising,
music, and fashion art direction, as well as his gaze towards the massive amount of creative
waste that is produced and disposed of in mass production. The mirror characters drawn in the
form of somewhat comical robot characters depict rough sketches proposed by designers to
clients, and they contain irony towards the creative industry of advertising that, under the
capitalist economy, is forced to acquiesce to the wishes of the client.
Hiromi NIIMI
SGD 6,800
Hiromi NIIMI
SGD 1,600
Hiromi NIIMI
SGD 1,600
Hiromi NIIMI
SGD 11,000
Hiromi NIIMI
SGD 12,500
Hiromi NIIMI
SGD 12,500
Yutaka SHIMOMURA (b. 1999)
Yutaka Shimomura is an artist who creates paintings with a focus on fetishistic love for
unattainable entities such as characters and idols, as well as on the theme of social media
landscapes. He mainly develops three different series of works, namely #, Re-touch, and \, and
explores experimental painting expressions that combine new materials and paint textures.
The # series currently in this exhibition expresses the attachment and violence towards two-
dimensional objects by arranging deflated balloons at regular intervals. Each balloon has a
character's face painted on it with acrylic paint and new meanings are given as they deflate. The
representation of two-dimensional characters standing up sculpturally as the balloons deflate
and the countless displays of them are a creative and overwhelming painting expression.
The Re-touch series visualizes the experience on the net via avatars. The sensation of humans
interacting with each other in a virtual world through the manipulation of avatars is conveyed
through the lingering impressions of fingers tracing the characters' faces. The traces are soft and
evoke human emotions such as love, admiration, and tenderness.
In today's world, digital spaces including social media are an integral part of people's daily lives,
and Shimomura's works observe the interaction between reality and the virtual world and the
relationship between people and images by overlapping human actions in reality with online
events, bringing out a new perspective.
Yutaka SHIMOMURA
# #0, 2022
Acrylic on panel
225 × 225 cm
SGD 5,000
Yutaka SHIMOMURA
SGD 600
Yutaka SHIMOMURA
SGD 800
Yutaka SHIMOMURA
SGD 2,500
three
three is an artist trio: Hirotaka Kawasaki, Shuhei Sasaki, and Kitaro Koide. They create three-
dimensional and installation artworks using materials such as figurines of pop-culture
characters, fish-shaped plastic soy sauce bottles commonly seen in Japan, and snacks. The
exhibition showcases their representative works, which utilize character figurines to create
three-dimensional sculptures. By reconstructing masses of melted figurines, they visualize pop
culture in a completely new way.
The titles of the works include the names of the figurines used, their total weight, and the
quantity.
three
2819g, 2022
Figure, PVC, Wood, Stainless steel
W30 × D30 × H63 cm
SGD 20,000
three
1174g, 2023
Figure, Aluminum, PVC, Wood
W32.5 × D4 × H47.5 cm
SGD 5,600
three
631.5g, 2023
Figure, Aluminum, PVC, Wood
W38 × D2.7 × H45.5 cm
SGD 3,500
three
879.5g, 2023
Figure, Aluminum, PVC, Wood
W38 × D2.7 × H45.5 cm
SGD 4,500
three
1468g, 2023
Figure, Aluminum, PVC, Wood
W32 × D4 × H42 cm
SGD 6,600
Masato YAMAGUCHI (b. 1980)
Masato Yamaguchi graduated from Hosei University with a degree in Economics, after which he
worked as a graphic designer influenced by the Shibuya style and graffiti of the 90s, culminating
in the founding of his art and design studio "idea sketch”. In 2011, he began creating the Plastic
Painting series of artworks and has been making art ever since.
The women depicted by Masato Yamaguchi all evoke a sense of déjà vu, as if we have met them
somewhere before. The way they crane their necks to look at the camera with a smart phone in
one hand and the close-ups of their faces, which are made to look cute by compositing filters,
remind us of the anonymous faces that appear on social media in large numbers every day. The
young women who post on such sites in these similar poses are a reflection of the times for
Yamaguchi, and even if there is no specific person or character to serve as a model, the viewer is
bound to feel a sense of familiarity with them, as if they were superimposed on themselves or
someone close to them. The images have a symbolism of the times similar to that of Marilyn
Monroe as depicted by Andy Warhol, whereby they represent the very image of contemporary
Asia that is vaguely shared beyond the borders of countries and languages.
Yamaguchi's sensibility subtly captures how the boundary between the real and the virtual is
becoming increasingly blurred and how sometimes what we see on a display is more real than
what is right in front of us. Crying over a LINE message, self-love over a doctored selfie, or true
love for a virtual doll have become so common in everyday life that they can hardly be called
fiction. Against the backdrop of such an era, Yamaguchi continues to question what reality is by
creating works on the theme of "trans-reality” (reality on the other side of reality).
Masato YAMAGUCHI
SGD 24,000
Masato YAMAGUCHI
SGD 24,000
Masato YAMAGUCHI
SGD 11,000
Masato YAMAGUCHI
SGD 11,000
Works on Loan
from Onfinitive Art Foundation
Tomoo GOKITA
ON LOAN
KYNE
Untitled, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
116.7 x 91 cm
ON LOAN
KYNE
Untitled, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
H:190 cm
ON LOAN
Hiroyuki MATSUURA
ON LOAN
Takashi MURAKAMI
ON LOAN
©︎2015 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Mr.
ON LOAN
©︎2015 Mr./Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Yoshitomo NARA
ON LOAN
Yoshitomo NARA
Untitled, 2005
1. color pencil on paper, 25.5 x 20.4 cm
2. color pencil on envelope, 14.5 x 11.2 cm
3. color pencil on envelope, 33.5 x 24.0 cm
4. color pencil on envelope, 16.8 x 23.0 cm
5. color pencil on envelope, 22.4 x 16.3 cm
6. color pencil, ink on paper, 29.6 x 21.0 cm
7. color pencil on envelope, 29.0 x 21.8 cm
ON LOAN
Kotao TOMOZAWA
ON LOAN
Kotao TOMOZAWA
ON LOAN