Fuyuko Matsui (松井冬子) is a japanese artist born in Morimachi, Shizuoka Prefecture, in 1974. Fuyuko has a BFA, a MFA and a Doctoral Degree (PhD) in Japanese Painting in the Tokyo University of the Arts. She uses her meticulous painting technique to draw you in to visceral scenes of fear, worry, loneliness, pain and death, exploring the haunted, interconnected realms of traditional and modern aesthetics. As one of the few women to have attained top training and mastery of traditional Japanese painting (nihonga) techniques in Japan, Matsui also cites centuries-old artistic influences, such as the iconoclastic eighteenth-century painter Soga Shohaku and the fifteenth-century painter Soga Jasoku. Having grown up in a house that has been in her family for fourteen generations, Matsui produces work that is steeped in tradition; at the same time, she breathes new life into unsettling images filled with grotesque figures of ghosts, entrails, and rotting corpses. “I don’t like sweet and cute art, Japanese art nowadays is like that, but if we think in centuries, in the Kamakura period for example, it was scarier, more ghostly. I want to return to that taste in my art.” “I want to create a sympathy, a strong feeling, between the viewer and myself, in a way I’m doing something that the viewer can’t do himself. It’s like people who occasionally think about jumping under a train. In my art I’m actually jumping under the train. That shock — I’m doing it for you.”
