Japanese artist Tomokazu Matsuyama will take his place in the spotlight during L.A. Art Week, bringing his cosmopolitan, eclectic vision to the City of Stars in a solo booth of monumental new paintings for Almine Rech at Frieze and in an engaging digital work that will take over the facade of the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. In anticipation of these milestones, Observer met with Matsuyama at his Greenpoint studio to discuss his process, his life journey and his approach to a multifaceted practice that translates his personal universe across media.
Matsuyama’s art embodies the cultural fluidity that defines the diasporic experience and global identity, reflecting the constant interplay of narratives that shape individuals moving across borders. Moving beyond the Western-centered concept of pop culture long associated with pop art, Matsuyama draws from a worldwide repertoire of imagery and influences. “I was a minority when I got to the U.S., but even in Japan, I was that, as my father was a pastor,” he explained. “Throughout my life, I couldn’t adapt. Now everybody’s trying to adapt to the world. In my work, I adapt different influences to reflect us.”
Matsuyama’s densely layered compositions capture the full complexity of today’s cultural and aesthetic landscape, integrating a wide spectrum of visual languages. His work freely merges globally pervasive elements of American consumer culture with sophisticated references to Japanese prints and centuries-old artistic traditions, alongside nods to key moments in art history.
For Matsuyama, distinctions between low and high culture dissolve within the same work—advertising fragments and mass-market cereal brands coexist alongside the latest designs from Balenciaga or Chanel, interwoven with sophisticated references to classical art and old masters. Leonardo’s composition for The Last Supper, for instance, might reappear inside an American supermarket, its sacred geometry repurposed within the language of consumer culture. Everything is absorbed, processed and reassembled onto a single pictorial plane, mirroring the way information is consumed and flattened in our daily digital experience. Rendered with a manga-inspired flatness and an Eastern traditional approach to landscape, Matsuyama’s compositions reflect a world in which cultural and commercial symbols loom larger than life.
His paintings become perfect mirrors of the chaotic marasmus of data, information and images that saturate contemporary media, exposing how these relentless streams continuously shape our perception of reality. Yet within this eclectic overload, his works achieve a striking sense of balance, enacting a seamless collapse of cosmopolitan and transcultural references. Through this process, Matsuyama lays bare a fundamental truth—that cultural history itself has always been an endless succession of exchanges, contaminations and hybridizations, where boundaries blur and reinvention is constant.
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Nonetheless, what makes Matsuyama’s work even more seductive is that, in appropriating the symbols that define contemporary pop culture, he meticulously studies the design and semiotic strategies behind them. During our visit, it became clear that Tomokazu Matsuyama’s studio is more than just an artist’s workspace—it is a full-scale production hub, a “factory” where around thirty people contribute to his process. These aren’t just assistants helping with painting; many are stationed behind computers conducting in-depth research into the advertisements and products that fuel consumer culture. The goal is not merely to reference these symbols but to replicate their mechanisms with precision. “I call it R&D—my research,” Matsuyama explains. “Once I have an idea, I bring them all the minor ideas, maybe ten, print out some examples, and then they would do research and find hundreds of them. From that, I will build a concept.”
As we discuss this highly professionalized system—one that rivals the studios of Warhol, Koons or Takashi Murakami—Matsuyama shows us a monumental painting in progress, depicting an entire corridor of an American supermarket lined with thousands of cereal boxes. On a nearby table, photographs of the boxes are laid out to mimic the way they actually appear on store shelves.
Matsuyama walks Observer through the precise and methodical process behind this canvas. His studio purchased large quantities of these cereal boxes, making subtle modifications to their original packaging to manipulate how they interact with others in their final commercial distribution. “We bought them all, scanned them, placed them and then painted and reproduced them. We are bringing this consumer reality into the final canvas,” Matsuyama says with a laugh. Once the perfect image is found, he redraws and repaints it. “All this talks about how Asian reincarnation reflects in the reincarnation of the American lifestyle: here you eat sugar, you get diabetes, you go to the hospital and you try to fix yourself with a prescription,” he says, gesturing toward a figure still in progress that will be holding what he calls a zombie drug. “You know, people die over sleeping pills, like Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley.”
What appears so playfully assembled is, in reality, an intricate fiction—a deliberate cultural remix, meticulously crafted and scientifically structured to analyze and visually test the viewer’s reactions to these symbols. In this sense, Matsuyama and his studio may be even more committed to the legacy of Warhol’s consumer culture analysis, approaching it with an added layer of intention and rigorous semiotic and cultural study. While Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Coca-Cola Bottles reflected the omnipresence of consumer goods in everyday life—and the underlying threat of death and depression within—Matsuyama’s work takes this examination even further, dissecting the globalized mechanisms that shape our visual and cultural environment.
In You, One Me Erase, another monumental piece, a salon-style hanging becomes a kaleidoscopic compendium of iconic artworks from across art history, freely appropriated and reinterpreted through Matsuyama’s chameleonic style. At its center, a tragicomic reinterpretation of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes explodes in psychedelic colors, flanked by chinoiseries and traditional Chinese ceramics—further complicating the infinite threads of intercultural exchange. Notably, each of these large-scale canvases takes Matsuyama’s studio approximately five months to move from conception and design through execution and completion, underscoring the meticulous nature of his process.
At the same time, Matsuyama’s highly structured studio operates as an incubator for emerging Japanese talent, offering young creatives the opportunity to work in the U.S. and gain inspiration for their own careers. Every member of his studio is from Japan, and Matsuyama fosters an environment where they can work, train and exhibit, often using Japanese software and communicating in their native language within the small but fertile artistic community he has built around him. Embracing the atelier model, he not only employs his studio members but also mentors them, ensuring they have a platform to launch their careers. “Our studio gives them visas, but also exhibitions. I have a staff that runs around to get them shows,” Matsuyama explains, emphasizing his commitment to nurturing a new generation of Japanese artists working abroad.
Like Warhol, Matsuyama’s practice interrogates the value society places on objects in a consumer-driven world and the fleeting nature of their cultural significance. But he pushes Warhol’s analysis further, juxtaposing these mass-produced icons with the “high art” aura of historical masterpieces and Japanese artistic tradition, recontextualizing them within a global framework. “When I first arrived in the United States and got in a supermarket, I was mesmerized by these corporate logos,” Matsuyama recalls. “I was like, ‘Wow, I’m here in America!’ That, for me, was a rather positive thing. I’m not criticizing this country; I’m just observing the reality of how people consume.”
It’s worth noting that when Matsuyama first arrived in the U.S., his initial attraction and artistic inspiration didn’t stem from pop art but from Jackson Pollock’s expressionist abstraction. This influence still lingers in his work, with flashes of abstraction bursting through the meticulously composed and precisely designed surfaces of his paintings. As the artist explains, these more spontaneous compositions often serve as his starting point, allowing him to establish a chromatic atmosphere and sensory experience he aims to achieve—despite ultimately translating those impulses through the colors of consumer products and luxury textile patterns.
Matsuyama still refers to his paintings as “fictional landscapes,” a term that underscores their grounding in the reality of consumer culture while simultaneously highlighting their ability to transcend cultural and historical barriers. With a mashup aesthetic deeply shaped by his formative years in the 1990s, his work extends and complicates the postmodern visual language theorized by Robert Venturi in Learning From Las Vegas. Matsuyama fully embraces the contradictions and complexities of American urban life, viewing them not as obstacles but as opportunities to engage with multiculturalism and reexamine shared traditions. His work feels acutely attuned to the realities of today’s globally interconnected world—far more so than the reductive, utopian ideals that resurgent nationalist narratives attempt to impose.
Given the universal resonance Matsuyama’s art aspires to, it’s unsurprising that his engagement with public space extends far beyond the facade of the TCL Chinese Theatre. Public art has been a vital dimension of his practice since the beginning of his career, when he supported himself as a painter in Brooklyn, working directly in the streets and interacting with passersby. Today, his large-scale public artworks span the globe, with one of his most significant interventions being Hanao-san, a monumental sculpture installed at Shinjuku Station East Square—one of Tokyo’s busiest railway stations, where it greets millions of commuters each day.
Matsuyama’s art could not find a more fitting stage than Los Angeles, a city where pop culture reigns supreme and where the connection between America and Asia is more deeply felt than almost anywhere else. His presence at Frieze heralds his upcoming major solo exhibition at the Mori Museum’s new Azabudai Hills Gallery in Tokyo—a show that directly succeeds last summer’s landmark Alexander Calder exhibition. In many ways, L.A. embodies the very ethos of Matsuyama’s practice: a cosmopolitan landscape that celebrates diversity, individuality and the freedom to construct new forms of expression by drawing from the vast, ever-expanding reservoir of global culture. “In Los Angeles, I feel there is a greater demand for showing different ethnicities in this country, and when you cross the ocean on the West Side, it is already Asia,” he says.
Working here is also personal for Matsuyama. “As someone who was welcomed with open arms by this region from Japan when I was eight, I feel that this city and its people hold a deeply special place in my heart,” he reflects. “Despite the fires, I believe the spirit of Los Angeles remains vibrant and unbroken. I hope, in the face of hardship, the work shown at Frieze can create moments of joy and beauty throughout the city.”
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