Fuyuko Matsui

Fuyuko Matsui is a young, Japanese, female artist, specializing in Nihonga paintings with a 'grotesque' or supernatural element. Her art has been widely exhibited in Japan and she has been featured on TV and magazines. She was one of the featured artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo's "Annual 2006" exhibition and at the Yokohama Museum of Art's "Nihonga Painting: Six Provocative Artists" in August 2006. Since then she has been concentrating on graduating from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts & Music.

Despite its often shocking aspects, she claims that her art is part of the tradition of Japanese art going back centuries. For example, her painting "Insane Woman under the Cherry Tree" (2006) is inspired by "Ogress under Willow Tree,” a painting by Soga Shohhaku (1730-1781), the iconoclastic Edo-period painter, who was influenced by the art of the Muromachi Era painter Soga Jasoku (d. 1483).

Part of her interest in the past comes from her background. She grew up in Shizuoka Prefecture in a house that had been in her family for 14 generations.

External links

*cite web| url= http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fa20060309a1.html/index.html | title=Young, fresh and traditional Japanese artists | publisher=C.B.Liddell | date = 2006-03-09

*cite web| url= http://www.culturekiosque.com/art/interview/fuyuko_matsui.html | title= Pinpricks in the Darkness: The Beautiful and Disturbing Art of Fuyuko Matsui publisher=C.B.Liddell| date = 2007-10-09

*cite web| url= http://www.myspace.com/matsuifuyuko | title= My space of Matsui Fuyuko - a dedicated site | date= 2008-08-30