Hisashi Tenmyouya (天明屋尚) is a Japanese artist born in Tokyo, Japan in 1966. During his early career he worked as an art director at a record company and did illustration work for underground Japanese magazines including Burst. He currently lives and works in Saitama, Japan and is represented by the Mizuma Art Gallery in Tokyo; he has shown steadily since his first show in 1990 at age 24. Armed with solid traditional Japanese painting techniques he paints contemporary motives, mixes warriors with football, paints graffiti on Buddhas and sets up break dance battles against cute Japanese dancers in Kimono, merging techniques and themes from traditional Japanese art with themes of modern Japanese life in his work: “That’s the kind of world we live in Japan now: going to the temple and yet painting graffiti, inheriting traditional Japanese beauty, yet inserting elements from the present Japanese culture. I call this “NEO-Traditional Japanese Painting (Neo Nihonga). ”
Even though his style uses traditional Japanese motifs and techniques (as a child, he attended traditional Japanese painting classes), he likes to manipulate those methods and to experiment with newer materials; use of real gold foils and finer than hair brush to draw nearly invisible fine lines characterizes his meticulous painting style (his work “Kamikaze” for instance sizes over 3 metres and took way over 3 months to finish), but he doesn’t use traditional powdered mineral pigments, and paints with acrylics, sometimes on tracing papers, going a little over the traditional boundaries. From his large, lucid paintings to his fine, delicate brush strokes, Tenmyouya’s works exude a historic feel that is also wholly contemporary: his deep knowledge of and respect for the ancient traditions of Japanese painting are apparent, but this respect is not mechanical – the work is supremely modern.
Considered a maverick in the world of traditional Japanese painting (in Japan, the artist has somewhat of an “outlaw” reputation for his mixing of fine art and street art), Tenmyouya is also sensible to the impact his art can have overseas; he got into the limelight for the western audiences in 1996, when he was the only Japanese artist selected for the FIFA World Cup Germany Poster. The work, executed in the traditional Ukiyo-e style, achieves martial-arts and theatrical effects, presenting the game of football as a battle between warring antagonists; thought not only as domestic art work, but also created for overseas audiences, this work choses to use two samurai, a common overseas stereotype of Japan, depicted playing soccer in full battle armor. In the same way, for example, the “Japanese Spirit” series draws upon and amplifies the stereotypes foreigners hold of Japan and is intended to be viewed by a foreign audience.
