山田 航平
1990 Born in Hokkaido, Japan
Kohei Yamada's paintings incorporate images and colors from existing artworks, simulate the history of contemporary art, especially Pop Art, which has continued since Marcel Duchamp.
Through his paintings, Yamada continues to question their contemporary potential by consistently deconstructing, redefining, and reconstructing their meaning and value.
In the process of creating, Yamada is thorough in his paintings, and with a delicacy that can be described as excessive, he strikes his brush in a very meticulous manner. By doing so, he brings the gravity and realistic tension of the Netherlandish paintings of Jan van Eyck and others to the picture plane. However, the fact that he manages to combine that heaviness with a visionary pop feel is one of the major factors that makes him unique in the Japanese scene, where low culture and art have become intertwined in recent years.
About drawing characters, Yamada says, "Except characters I don’t paint any other motifs", which tells us about characteristics of his generation. Having grown up surrounded by Japanese subculture and cyberculture, this generation of artists is always thinking about how to integrate their heritage into their art. Yamada grasps the contexts of works of others and puts them into a single character, and "tells a story of the world through a character", as it is in manga and animations. This way of expressing own generation and culture is what keeps his creative process going.
In other words, what’s so fascinating about Kohei Yamada as an artist is his creativity to boldly simulate contemporary art and connect it with his own historical background, sublimate it into his works with a thorough technical skill that is also in line with the techniques of classical painting. All of this is based on Yamada's strong desire to have his paintings inscribed in the long history of art that will continue into the future. Through art, Yamada has the power to captivate people with his sincere attitude of not being swayed by history, but rather critically examining it, and by doing so, he strives to preserve his works in history.