SHINPEI OKAWA’S PAINTINGS: SURREALISM REVISITED

A YOUNG JAPANESE ARTIST MAKES THE SPIRIT OF A CLASSIC MODERNIST AESTHETIC HIS OWN

Shinpei Okawa
Niche Gallery
Ginza Building, Floor 3, Ginza 3-3-12
Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061 Japan
December 14-24, 2022

by Edward M. Gómez

TOKYO — The Niche Gallery in Tokyo’s Ginza district, an area of department stores and upscale shops that is bustling again as the coronavirus pandemic wanes, even as Japan wrestles with an eighth wave of infection — here, almost everyone still dutifully wears a face mask — is a small venue that lives up to its name.

The artist Shinpei Okawa at Niche Gallery, Tokyo, December 2022, with his two-panel painting “Fukidamari wa sora ni tokete” (“A Drift Melting in the Sky”), 2022, oil on canvas, 63.78 x 95.39 inches (162 x 242.3 centimeters). Photo by Edward M. Gómez

Cozily tucked away on an upper floor of a nondescript building near the main avenue that cuts a south-north path through Ginza, the gallery just presented a solo exhibition of the paintings in oil on canvas by the 39-year-old, Tokyo-based artist Shinpei Okawa. A graduate of Tōkyō Geijutsu Daigaku (Tokyo University of the Arts), one of Japan’s best-known and most prestigious art schools, Okawa for many years has been developing a technique of making paintings that feels both creatively impulsive and deeply personal.