Tomokazu Matsuyama has spent two decades in New York City and still cannot imagine leaving. That loyalty is not incidental to his work. The city, with its nearly 200 languages and hundred-odd religions, is less a backdrop for his practice than its very subject. "What's us?" he said in a 2023 interview with Avant Arte. "That's what I think of myself when I'm painting."

Matsuyama was born in Japan and came of age between two cultures, a position that initially felt like a constraint and gradually revealed itself as a methodology. His paintings are dense, layered accumulations of image and reference: Edo-period woodblock prints sit alongside Pop Art and graffiti, kimono patterns dissolve into fashion magazine cutouts, corporate logos are translated into the visual vocabulary of the Old Masters. A Honda becomes Hirst. A Bridgestone becomes Basquiat. Nothing is copied, he is careful to note. Everything is sampled. "Sampling or appropriation is that you pay respect," he said in a 2019 interview with HYPEBEAST. "I use resources that are either extremely public or extremely old."

The results are paintings of remarkable intricacy, each taking three to four months to complete, every detail rendered by hand. What appears at first glance to be a digitally constructed image reveals itself, on closer inspection, as something altogether more patient and more human. The layering is the point. When things are layered, he has observed, they speak to a wider audience.

That ambition, to make an image that exceeds any single nationality or culture, to forge what he calls a global language, has taken Matsuyama from his Brooklyn studio to exhibitions in Japan, China, Paris, and Venice, where his solo exhibition Mythologiques was presented concurrently with the 60th Venice Biennale. Earlier this year, his animation Morning Again appeared nightly across more than a hundred screens in Times Square as part of the Midnight Moment program, a work about diversity, independence, love, and hope.