Nakakaze Shinji is an artist who depicts the emotional fluctuations hidden within people through overlapping lines and characters.
What begins as a doodle-like accumulation of lines gradually takes shape, emerging on canvas as a somewhat incomplete and unstable presence.
Nakakaze’s ongoing pursuit of the “inner necessity of drawing” and the “breathing of lines” evolves to a deeper level in this exhibition.
Dark Fire for the Walking Red Queen
2025
Oil on canvas
72.7 x 91 x 3 cm
Dark Fire for the Walking Red Queen
2025
Oil on canvas
72.7 x 91 x 3 cm
Nightingale
2025
Oil on canvas
41 x 31.8 x 3 cm
imago
2025
Oil on canvas
91 x 116.7 x 3 cm
Learning from the Nymphs
2025
Oil on canvas
41 x 31.8 x 3 cm
Red and Yellow Emptiness
2025
Oil on canvas
72.7 x 60.6 x 3 cm
Nakakaze Shinji
Born in Matsudo, Chiba in 1994, he graduated from the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts, and as an artist, paints characters on canvas. Confused by deadlocked situations and the overwhelming amount of information around him, he releases his stagnant, tangled thoughts onto the canvas as if to loosen them up with the doodles of his characters. Starting from there, he creates concrete shapes from the overlapping lines in his mind. He then picks up these lines and transfers them from paper to canvas, breathing life into his characters. The softly spread paint defies gravity and the rules of the world, creating a space where we can breathe comfortably in the modern world.
I can’t keep up with the volume and speed of the information found in the world, and my imagination is hindered so I continue to draw line drawings reminiscent of manga characters to gain even a small sense of being alive.
I believe that excessive brightness is a factor in our current information overload. In fairy tales of old, the story progresses when people light a fire and see an object. Today also, shining artificial light from a smartphone or other source allows us to see detailed information and brings various unseen events to light.
Light, and by extension fire, play an important role in invigorating a situation. In a sense, drawing can also be seen as an act of revealing the invisible. However, rather than using light to clarify information, I want to express myself by focusing on the dark side of my own inner self and my senses to feel more alive.
I’ve been drawing characters with lines since I was a child, so my hands memorize and know the lines of characters. The intersecting lines that emerge on the screen are comprised of both characters and abstract shapes. I feel as if my own senses and memories are certainly at work within that ambiguity.
In today’s world, where there is no time for light to shine, I want to feel, even if just a little, that I’m alive through such darkness.
Nakakaze Shinji