This painting by Tomokazu Matsuyama offers a strangely comforting vision of contemporary domestic bliss, complete with ferns, an airbrushed golden retriever, and an unopened Amazon delivery. Matsuyama blends visual elements taken from Eastern and Western culture in order to arrive at something that will be familiar to all people, even if it is not totally representative of anything real. The architecture is familiar to anyone who has lived somewhere touched by European colonialism; the figures are borrowed from the pages of fashion magazines; their clothes are decorated with a mixture of art historical references, from ancient Japanese patterns and images to the visual language of Modernist Abstraction; menus are strewn on the ground. It is all part of Matsuyama’s quest to blend the familiar local with the familiar global.

Almost Rockwell-esque in its concept, Matsuyama’s signature sly nods to contrasting cultural contexts emerge as you examine the details. Chinese takeout menus litter the porch, a detail that immediately connotes Asian but more specifically the Asian experience in America: these are not “in group” communiques but an outreach from a Chinese restaurant, in English, the their surrounding community. There are more than 40,000 Chinese restaurants across America—more than the total number of McDonalds in the whole world, combined. Perhaps it’s fair to say that Chinese takeout is more American than McDonalds? Atop one cluster of menus, a partly hidden package unmistakably reads as Amazon. The internet has brought the world together and the box is unquestionably that of the retail giant; whether or not an individual is particularly supportive or critical of their larger role in the world, Amazon’s presence is undeniable. These details combined paint the picture of a space that, while structurally quite classic, speak to something entirely of the now. This is a snapshot of present day, present time.