Artists open to commissions

Toshimasa is a Japanese oil painter born and based in Tokyo in 1994. His paintings are drawn from personal memory and the landscapes he has inhabited alongside the people he loves: gardens encountered in childhood, forests explored together, waterways that carry the particular emotional charge of having been there with someone. These are not composite images or invented scenes — they are specific places, held in memory and returned to through paint.

He works with typically three to four brushes, building each composition with attention to texture, light, and color. The influence of Impressionism — particularly Monet's sustained investigation into how light transforms a scene — runs through his practice, though Toshimasa's concerns extend beyond technique. For him, painting is not primarily about rendering but about recovering: the act of returning to a place that no longer exists except as something carried inside. His canvases are intimate in scale, yet each one holds a quality of expansion — the sense that the emotional space of a memory is larger than the image that contains it.

He describes his practice as an ongoing exploration of the relationship between memory, landscape, and time. His work has been exhibited in 14 shows and is held in private collections across the United States, Europe, and Asia. He continues to paint in Tokyo, building an archive of places that existed, and of the lives that gave them meaning.

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Michiko Tamura is a Japanese Nihonga painter based in Hiroshima. She holds a doctoral degree from Hiroshima City University's Faculty of Arts, where she studied traditional Japanese painting techniques before developing a practice that moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction. Working with mineral pigments, gold and silver leaf, ink, and washi paper, she explores the beauty that resides within transition — the moment a bloom reaches its height, a petal begins to dry, a form already fading.

Her process begins with the hand: layering, scraping, dissolving. Through accumulation and erosion, surfaces are built rather than merely painted. Flowers, branches, and landscapes appear in her work, yet they function not as botanical depictions but as thresholds where visibility thins and memory enters. Her abstract paintings, presented exclusively through Kyoto Art Gallery, take this further: what remains is color density, mineral grain, and surface vibration — resonance without narrative.

Tamura's work has been recognised with the International Takifuji Art Award and the Sakura Prize at the Garyuzakura Nihonga Grand Prix, and a work awarded at the Okazakura Prize Exhibition entered the collection of the Sato Sakura Museum. She has been selected for the Souga Exhibition and Spring Souga Exhibition on multiple occasions, and her work was included in Seed: Yamatane Museum of Art Nihonga Award 2024.

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Yuta Tamura is a Japanese artist born in 1987 and based in Kobe, working at the intersection of digital visual language and physical material. His practice is driven by a sustained inquiry into connection: what it means to reach toward others, and why division so often inhabits the same space as the desire to belong.

Tamura's compositions combine pixelated, grid-based forms — the visual grammar of digital communication — with cordage and other tactile materials that carry the weight of physical contact. The pixel becomes a metaphor for human relationship: proximity without fusion, structure without resolution. Against this digital scaffolding, rope and string assert the literal act of binding, tying, reaching across. His surfaces leave deliberate blank space that invites viewers to bring their own memories to the work.

Tamura has held solo exhibitions in Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, and Kobe, with group presentations in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Bangkok, Hawaii, London, and beyond. He received the Kakegawa City Special Award at IAG AWARD 2025, and his work has been featured in Al-Tiba9 Magazine.

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Kazuhiro Shimoda is a Japanese abstract painter born in 1961 and based in Kumamoto. His practice is organised around a single, evolving series: rebirth of memory. The past is the reservoir of joy, grief, and struggle; the present is the daily accumulation of sensation; the future is what remains on the canvas — a life compressed into paint, waiting for each viewer to make it their own.

His canvases are dense with energy. Layers of vivid blues, reds, yellows, and greens accumulate and collide, building surfaces alive with interior movement. Shimoda holds impulse and structure in tension, producing paintings that feel at once spontaneous and deeply considered.

Shimoda has exhibited in New York, Miami, Santa Fe, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Korea, and Taipei, including ONEART Taipei 2026 and Infinity Japan Art Show. He has received the Grand Prize at the International Fine Art Grand Prix Exhibition and the Art Critic Prize, among other distinctions.

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Kayo Nomura is a Japanese abstract painter born in Nagoya, raised across several cultures including time in the United States, and based in Hyogo. As a child unable to speak English, she found that real communication with a classmate was possible without shared words. That early encounter shaped her conviction that people can connect through feeling rather than language — and that painting is a universal medium for it.

Her practice centres on Art Through Dialogue. Rather than working from pre-formed images, she listens — to the person in front of her, to the space, to the moment — and paints what she encounters. In Dialogue Drawing®, her signature approach, she draws out emotions through conversation and translates them into visual form in real time. In live sessions with musicians, gesture becomes response rather than decision.

Nomura has held solo exhibitions across Japan — including Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Hokkaido, and Nagano — and in the United States and Taiwan. Her work has been shown at Isetan Shinjuku and Hankyu Umeda, and she has held residencies at the Earth-Life Science Institute in Tokyo and Tenjinyama Art Studio in Hokkaido.

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Chiharu Sakamoto is a Japanese painter based in Gunma, working primarily with acrylic and airbrush. Since beginning her airbrush practice in 2007, she has refined it into a precise language of quietness. Without visible brushstrokes, her gradients are weightless and her surfaces seem to glow from within, with the fragile quality of light just before it shifts.

Though her motifs include the sea, flowers, and sky, what she truly renders is the atmosphere around them: the humidity of morning light, the stillness of a clearing sky. Her works do not compete with a space; they settle into it, shaping its atmosphere over time like a window or a steady breath.

Sakamoto has exhibited in France, Portugal, Australia, and the United States, and has received the Special Judges' Prize at the 20th Japan Art Salon Painting Grand Prix (selected by Akira Tatehata). In 2025 her painting Underwater Night Gathering was selected for Artsy's Earth Day digital billboard campaign with Outfront Media across the New York City subway network.

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Tetsuya is a Japanese contemporary painter based in Nagano, working at the intersection of nature, rhythm, and perception. His path was shaped by an encounter with Monet's Water Lilies at university — a work that showed him painting could transform how reality is felt, rather than simply record what is seen.

His paintings are built from color, form, and movement arranged with a rhythm that is at once intuitive and structural — at times musical, at times mathematical. His subjects come from the natural world — light, air, seasonal change — and from moments of quiet nostalgia in daily life, translated into color relationships and spatial intervals. The result moves between abstraction and figuration.

Tetsuya has been recognised at the Finale International Art Exhibition, the ARTBOX Grand Prix, the Irufu Biennale Nihonga Grand Prix, and the Nagano and Niigata Prefectural Art Exhibitions. He is a member of the Nagano Prefectural Art Association.

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Satomi Tanji is an abstract painter based in Saitama, Japan. After careers as cabin crew for an international airline and as a subtitle translator, she began painting after becoming a mother. Those earlier lives — compressed skies in aircraft cabins, condensed language in subtitles, layered time in early parenthood — shape paintings that hold air, silence, and duration in balance.

Working with alcohol ink, acrylic, and metal leaf, she embraces processes that resist rigid control: pigment spreads, separates, evaporates. What remains is not gesture but sediment. Light does not sit on top of the painting; it moves within it.

Her work functions architecturally. Installed in hotel corridors, elevator halls, and private interiors, her paintings recalibrate a space rather than decorate it. Commission clients include The Gate Hotel Fukuoka by Hulic, Courtyard by Marriott Kyoto Shijo Karasuma, and Okinawa PMG Golf Resort. Her first overseas solo exhibition, in Taipei in 2021, sold out, and she has since shown at Affordable Art Fair Melbourne, ART TAINAN, ART TAICHUNG, Made in Japan New York, and the National Art Center Tokyo.

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yunnGold is a Japanese contemporary artist based in Tokyo, creating paintings centred on light, warmth, and the quiet persistence of hope. After the death of her husband she raised two children alone, and within that reality discovered the resilience her work now carries. When paintings she gave in gratitude were said to bring good fortune to their recipients, she found her purpose: to offer light through paint.

Her canvases are layered with bold reds, radiant golds, luminous blues, and whites, often composed around a central radiance that expands outward. She sometimes draws on feng shui — direction, placement, and personal wishes — but the heart of her practice is simpler: telling the viewer there is light in their life too.

Her work spans painting, costume design for television and commercials, and large murals for cafés and boutiques. She has exhibited at JAPAN WEEK in Manchester (2025), Salon de Art Japoné in Paris (2024), and Japonica 2026 in France.

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&eni is a Japanese artist from Shizuoka who studied architectural design at Nihon University College of Art. Her practice begins not with painting something new, but with discovering what is already there.

Her primary material is the natural lotus leaf, each carrying a unique vein structure. She cuts, rearranges, and layers these elements into compositions that feel both organic and quietly structured — a dialogue between natural form and human perception, guided by an architect's sense of repetition, balance, and rhythm.

Her palette comes from daily observation: sunset skies, fallen leaves, rusted metal. Her works are made to draw the viewer closer, rewarding careful looking with intricate vein patterns beneath layers of paint. Her work has found collectors through Artsy and corporate commissions.

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Taiyo Tono is a Japanese painter based in Kyoto, born in Osaka in 1986. She studied architecture and design at Kyoto Seika University, which gave her a precise sense of structure. Beneath the apparent spontaneity of her color-saturated surfaces lies a considered sense of how a canvas holds together.

Her work draws on travel, nature, and the emotional texture of everyday life: botanical forms in full color, coastal light, mountain snow, quiet city corners, and the visual richness of Asian landscapes and street culture — not as records, but as lived sensation translated into color.

Tono has taken part in 19 exhibitions, and her works are held in private collections across the United States, Europe, and Asia. She continues to paint in Kyoto.

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Hiroshi Miyamoto is a Japanese abstract painter born in Ishikawa Prefecture in 1949. He held his first solo exhibition in 1970 while a student at Doshisha University and exhibited actively in Kyoto and Tokyo through the 1970s and 1980s. After a pause, he resumed full-scale production in 2017, combining gallery exhibitions with live painting sessions — thirteen so far, in Osaka, Nagoya, and Tokyo.

At the core of his practice is Relativity Painting, an original philosophy refined over decades. First awakened to pictorial structure through Cézanne and drawn to the physical dynamism of Jackson Pollock, his sensibility has deepened into one shaped by Japanese aesthetics and the rhythms of nature. For Miyamoto, a painting is not a fixed image but a living field of relationships, where color, light, shadow, form, and rhythm continuously interact.

In 2024 he published the Relativity Painting Manifesto, setting out ten principles for an evolving, relational, and spiritually grounded way of painting. His canvases offer a luminous clearing within a dense forest of perception — spaces where thought can wander and painting unfolds as a chain of expression shared with the viewer.

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TTY is a Japanese artist based in Osaka who relocates the energy of street art into the home. His practice begins with a simple question: what happens when street art is placed inside a domestic space? Moving from wall to canvas, from outdoors to indoors, he stages an experiment in cultural translation.

His motifs come from ordinary life — familiar gestures, quiet scenes, mundane moments — but small distortions enter each composition: a slight misalignment, a touch of humor, a detail just off-register. Visually his works are minimal and direct, with simplified compositions and bold color fields. Beneath that clarity sits a persistent question: can street culture coexist with the intimacy of daily life?

TTY has exhibited in Australia, and his work has appeared in a Japanese television drama, which led to a significant increase in commission requests.

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Aki Kurihara is a Japanese painter based in Saitama whose gentle, seemingly cute surfaces hold subtle distortions and unease. Rooted in oil painting and informed by a background in visual effects, her work combines painterly flatness with a quiet surrealism in which reality and imagination mingle.

Influenced by Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, she embraces bold color fields and a decorative sensibility, while fragments of everyday life and images encountered on social media are reshaped into scenes that feel familiar yet strangely displaced. Rather than following sketches rigidly, she lets unexpected forms and color relationships emerge as she paints.

Kurihara has exhibited internationally, including at Salon Art Shopping Paris (2022), and her work has been on permanent display at Hotel Gran Bach Atami since 2024. She has also shown at Gallery Lemonde, Gallery Lumani, Gallery Hyakunen to Ichinichi, and Kanda Koto Gallery in Tokyo.

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azalea is a Japanese contemporary painter based in Kyoto, creating fantastical worlds at the boundary between the hand-painted and the digital. Her work draws on the visual language of animation and video games, yet every surface keeps the warmth of paint applied by hand — vivid enough to awaken wonder, gentle enough to offer comfort.

A recurring figure in her paintings is a boy traveling freely through extraordinary landscapes: walking through misty forests, fishing in underwater cities, drifting across pastel seas with birds, reaching skyward with a balloon. Through his journeys she explores freedom, hope, and quiet healing — not an escape from reality, but a liberation of the inner world.

azalea has exhibited with Kyoto Art Gallery in Berlin twice, with every work sold at both exhibitions. She continues to paint in Kyoto.

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