Tomokazu Matsuyama: From Semi-Professional Snowboarder to Art World Sensation

ArtNet, October 25, 2025

 

At Savannah College of Art and Design, Tomokazu Matsuyama's meticulous and decadently detailed paintings dazzle.

 

 Today, artist Tomokazu Matsuyama has a sprawling studio employing over 30 assistants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He is the star of museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide. His works reside in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the De Young Museum, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys are among his collectors.

 

But he never set out to be an artist.

 

When the Japanese-born artist came to New York in 2002, at the age of 25, he didn't know what to do with his life. He'd been a semi-professional snowboarder until a serious injury ended his prospects. He enrolled at the Pratt Institute, studying graphic design. "Snowboarding was actually a very creative sport, in the way you use the slopes," he said, openly considering his trajectory during a recent conversation.

 

 And Matsuyama does emanate the outsider edge of a snowboarder: experimental, daring, with a dose of bravura. In his wildly detailed paintings, Matsuyama freely remixes motifs and techniques from across epochs and cultures. His hybrid visions are places where anything is possible. Japanese Ukiyo-e prints appear alongside Flemish still life and an empty pizza box. "When boundaries don't exist, things can become nostalgic, fantastical, surreal," he said, when asked about this DJ-like approach. Every inch of the canvas is treated with equal significance, and even small passages of his densely layered compositions can take months to complete.

 

 These paintings have earned him acclaim, and this year, Matsuyama's career is going full throttle. We spoke at the opening of "Liberation Back Home," a solo exhibition at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in September, an exhibition that encompasses both an interior gallery and SCAD's publicly viewable jewel-box window galleries. The show is organized by associate curator Brittany Richmond and curator Ben Tollefson. Earlier this spring, he opened the solo exhibition "FIRST LAST" at Azabudai Hills Gallery in Tokyo. Last fall, he had an intimate exhibition atEdward Hopper House in Nyack, New York, last year. All in all, it's been a whirlwind few years. He shows no signs of slowing down.

 

 An International Man of History

 

 Matsuyama's freewheeling synthesizing of cultural references in some ways mirrors his own biography.  The artist was born in 1976 in Takayama, a city in Japan's mountainous Gifu Prefecture, best known for its idyllic Edo wooden architecture. At 8 years old, Matsuyama's family relocated to Orange County, California, and he was plunged headlong is Southern California culture. His father, a Christian pastor, had been interested in the possibilities of cross-cultural exchange; Matsuyama spent his three years in California learning to skateboard.

 

"The youth culture of the West Coast was very vibrant in the '80s, the surfing and skateboarding," he recalled, "That stayed with me."  Those years offered Matsuyama his first exposure to the subcultures that now shape his aesthetic. His paintings-bold, unabashed, and bright-reverberate with West Coast skate energy.
That early interest in skateboarding segued into a full-fledged passion for snowboarding. Matsuyama followed the sport into college at Tokyo's Sophia Universi ty, until a devastating ankle break left him bedridden. "I was in rehab for 10 months," he said, "I realized I wanted to find something I could do for the rest of my life." Then came New York, where he enrolled in school for graphic design, only to realize he didn't particularly want to work for a client.
 
 "It didn't click. I couldn't work for a client, but then I didn't know what else to do. What can I do without a client?" said Matsuyama. "Basically, create art. We have galleries and museums and collectors, but you're still creating for yourself in some sense."
He began painting and soon broke free from convention. One fateful day, he went to the art store Pearl Paint in New York's Chinatown and bought the largest canvas he could, only to realize later on that no matter how big the canvas was, no one was seeing his work in his apartment. "I wasn't painting in New York. I was painting in my own bedroom," he said. "Living in Williamsburg, I knew I needed to go out there and get my work seen, so I decided to paint murals. It wasn't graffiti, but murals."
 
 He found a community of artists in the process. "I was heavily influenced by the '90s era with its abundance of information and editing," he said. "We were transforming one information with another, docking them to see what happened. It became our generational voice, and with that generational voice we didn't need to have an academic practice. We created new outlets."
 

 Making Meaning From the Mix

 

 Over the two decades since Matsuyama started making art, he has defined a voice where East and West don't so much meet as meld. "I didn't want to talk about the Asian diaspora because I started making art in New York," he explained. "Liberation Back Home" brings together works from 2022 to 2025, which are a testament to his syncretizing visual language.

 

His canvases are shaped, recalling, in moments, the work of Ellsworth Kelly. These canvases typically depict interior spaces and are filled with avatar-like people seemingly plucked out of glossy magazines. The ideas of inside and outside seem to open and fold on themselves like origami in two dimensions.
 
 In the pre-Internet age,  Matsuyama found inspiration at the newsstand, particularly the pages of architecture and interior-design magazines, like Architectural Design and Elle Decor, which continue to inspire him.
 

Their pages were thrilling and provocative. "In Japan specifically, we never invite people to our homes. It's something very private," he said. "There was no Instagram or social media when I came to New York.  Flipping through pages of a magazine and a celebrity showing their home-for me, it was shocking. It was almost like like pornography." But he was also extremely intrigued.

 

The interiors in his paintings now are expressions of identity, places where the connection between what's private is made significant through design, culture, and architecture. His approach can be ecumenical, finding parallels and dialogues across time and culture.

In one work, Blowin' in the Wind (2025), the artist took inspiration from famed New York designer Milton Glaser's 1966 depiction of Bob Dylan as a silhouette of the artist with rainbow hair, which appeared on his greatest hits album.

 

Matsuyama has long been interested in Dylan because he was one of the few white artists engaged with the realities of the Civil Rights movement. "Milton Glazer made that poster with both the West Coast psychedelic quality of his hair, but with a little bit more sophisticated New York style." Matsuyama was also struck by Glaser's decision to make Bob Dylan a black rather than a white outline.

 

Blowin' in the Wind presents two richly detailed interior spaces with four interpretations of Glaser's Dylan floating throughout. Silhouettes in shades of white, black, yellow, and red, a nod to ethnic diversity. Other symbols appear throughout. Two roosters near rainbow flags nod to LGBTQ rights. In one corner, he references Henri Rousseau's The Football Players, but transforms the figures into basketball players, which he says is an allusion to the aspirational role of athletics in the U.S., particularly for minorities.

Installation view "Tomokazu Matsuyama: Liberation Back Home" on view at SCAD, 2025.

 

Another painting, Catharsis Metanoia (2024), he refers to as a kind of self-portrait, an artist caught between Japanese and American identities. Overlaying a lavish-looking interior with the famed photo of American soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima. A picture of a sculpture by Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi appears in another corner. "Noguchi volunteered to go to the Japanese internment camps," said the artist. "He wanted to design the Hiroshima memorial, too." Noguchi, who was born in California, was regarded by many fellow Japanese as an outsider and with suspicion. He folds in these reflections on identity with a subtlety of touch.

 

Matsuyama ultimately wants as many people as possible to see his works and to find echoes of themselves within his works. In recent years, he's turned largely toward sculpture that can be installed in public settings.

 

"Not everybody can spend the $20 or $30 to go to New York museums. My paintings started as murals and now that's become sculpture," he said. Included in the show is his sculpture Runner (2022), a stainless-steel abstracted vision of an athlete in motion. The sculpture had been installed at the 2022 U.S. Open in New York. "What's the strongest, most intense material? What holds every color?" he said, "That's stainless steel." In Asian cultures, mirrors can be spaces for the appearance of the Buddha, too, he notes. It's a material that seems to possess the contradictory impulses of this art: the divine, the commercial, luxury, and industrial grit. "But most of all, it's reflective," he said, "It can contain all of us."

 

"Liberation Back Home" is on view at the SCAD Museum of Art, 601 Turner Blvd, Savannah, GA 31401, through January 4, 2026.