Tomokazu Matsuyama Morning Sun

For the first time, Tomokazu Matsuyama engages with Edward Hopper's vision, and specifically the 1952 masterwork "Morning Sun," in his compelling new painting, "Morning Sun Dance" (2025). This exhibition offers an intimate look at this significant work and its studies, showcasing the artist's dynamic fusion of Japanese motifs and aesthetics, art historical references, and elements of mass culture.

Born in 1976 in Gifu, Japan, Matsuyama is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. His work spans painting, sculpture, and installation, organically blending and reimagining diverse elements–such as ancient and modern, figurative and abstract, Eastern and Western. His art reflects both his cross-cultural experiences and the evolving nature of contemporary society in our information-driven world.

Matsuyama says about his upcoming exhibition at Edward Hopper House Museum: 

"While Edward Hopper’s Morning Sun captures a moment of introspective stillness within the psychological landscape of mid-century urban life, his treatment of solitude, light, and constructed space continues to echo in my own approach to painting. Rather than direct reference, I find a quiet resonance in how his work stages the tension between presence and absence—between what is illuminated and what remains unseen."

Through a painterly language that bridges figuration and abstraction, I explore similar emotional undercurrents, reconfiguring them within a chromatic atmosphere that reflects today’s visual and psychological realities. In this way, Hopper’s legacy becomes not a model to follow, but a layered point of departure—one that invites reinterpretation through color, composition, and the shifting nuances of contemporary solitude.