The Art of Japanese Painter Natsuko Tanihara – Contemporary Ukiyo-e and the Baroque of Suffering, Trauma, and Pain.
2025/06/10

Psychological Landscapes of Trauma in Contemporary Ukiyo-e – The Hyperaesthetics of Pain in the Paintings of Natsuko Tanihara

The Art of Japanese Painter Natsuko Tanihara – Contemporary Ukiyo-e and the Baroque of Suffering, Trauma, and Pain.

 

Is suffering a decoration, or a desperation?

 

Natsuko Tanihara is perhaps the closest to darkness of all living Japanese female artists. But her darkness is not nihilism – it is an act of courage. Raised in the shadow of loneliness and pain, the numbness of adults and the brutal bullying by peers, she grew up in an old country house where the lights went out at seven and her mother – too ill to protect her – remained silent. Tanihara has never forgotten how helplessness hurts, nor how long the hands of a child tremble when they do not know whether there will be a tomorrow. It is from this darkness, from those cold mornings and solitary aches, that her paintings were born – not scenes from life, but landscapes of a shattered psyche that, despite tears and rage, tries to cut out what has been wounded in order to survive one more day.

 

Imagine an oiran, whose hairstyle resembles a flower, but instead of petals bears thorns. A little girl whose hand extends into branches, as if her body were seeking escape into another form of existence. A woman wrapped in red fiber, as if trauma were a woolen cocoon of inherited guilt. In Tanihara’s paintings, every gesture may be both decoration and desperation – and every sequin’s glimmer reflects not light, but pain. These are not allegories. These are inner landscapes of the psyche, painted with merciless precision and unsettling tenderness.

 

In contrast to the aesthetic coolness of Superflat or the irony of Murakami, Tanihara creates art that does not observe – it feels. Her baroque has no axis, only tension. Her contemporary ukiyo-e is not a memory – it is a wound. Through this hyperaesthetization of pain, she produces painting that cannot be passed by indifferently – for it strikes the senses and lingers beneath the eyelids. At times, the light in her works resembles a sky after catastrophe. At times, a theatrical spotlight over a domestic tragedy. But it always exposes rather than absolves. And Tanihara – though she never speaks plainly – makes one understand: the wounds you cover with glitter will still hurt.

 

The Art of Japanese Painter Natsuko Tanihara – Contemporary Ukiyo-e and the Baroque of Suffering, Trauma, and Pain.

 

Who is Natsuko Tanihara?

 

In 1989, amid the suburban bustle of Saitama Prefecture, Natsuko Tanihara was born – an artist who can turn darkness into light, and the body into ornament. Her paintings hold no sweetness or innocent melancholy. Instead, there is a piercing eye that remembers the nighttime terrors of childhood, the scent of old kimono, the silence of rural Japan after dusk – and violence. In her early years of high school in Hokkaidō, she was brutally bullied by her peers, an ordeal that at one point resulted in serious injury. Even earlier, as a little girl, she didn’t play like other children. Instead, she crushed eggshells and seashells, rubbing them into paper to create pastel collages – as if, from a young age, she was already seeking an escape route – but also a sublimation – for that which cannot be said aloud.

 

Her artistic path led her through Kyoto City University of Arts – initially through Nihonga, traditional Japanese painting using ink, pigment, and quiet contemplation. But where others saw spiritual balance, she felt dissonance. After half a year, she abandoned tradition and turned to Yōga – Western oil painting techniques. Yet the white, classical canvas gave her no peace – she said that “the brush did not want to move across it.” Only black, matte velvets began to absorb her visions. Influenced by the fact that American expressionist Julian Schnabel painted on velvet, Tanihara found her medium – a surface that absorbs light and reflects only what darkness allows us to see.

 

Her childhood consisted not only of peer violence and physical pain from her injury in Hokkaidō – where she had been moved due to her father’s job – but also of lonely nights in her grandparents’ rural house in Aomori. Her mother’s illness, the night silence broken only by the creaking of wooden beams, the ritual of dressing in kimono, and the elusive, almost spiritual dread she felt in the night’s darkness – all of this would later be reflected in her paintings, as though darkness was not merely a backdrop, but the very subject of her art.

 

After returning from a year of study in Paris – where she visited museums and absorbed the directness of Northern Renaissance art, from Rembrandt and van Eyck to Grünewald – she came back to Japan to begin her doctorate. There, her career began to accelerate. Recognized at prestigious VOCA exhibitions of young art, awarded by cultural foundations (Gotoh Foundation), supported by the cities of Kyoto and Osaka (Sakuya Konohana Award), a resident in Torajirō Kojima’s studio under the auspices of the Ohara Museum in Kurashiki, and featured on the Break Zenya program – Tanihara was from the very start regarded as a remarkable artist.

 

And yet, it is difficult to speak of her as a “recognized” artist in the conventional sense. This is not a career, but a story of enduring pain, of a suppressed scream turned into color. In a Japanese culture where elegance is often mistaken for restraint, and suffering for honor – her paintings are brutally honest. Sometimes too honest. That is precisely why they are necessary, even if not to everyone’s taste.

 

The Art of Japanese Painter Natsuko Tanihara – Contemporary Ukiyo-e and the Baroque of Suffering, Trauma, and Pain.

 

Matter and Darkness – What Does Tanihara Express Herself Through?

 

In Natsuko Tanihara’s work, technique is not just craft – it is a philosophical structure. Her paintings are not born on white canvas, but on black velvet that reflects no light, only absorbs it. Velvet is no accident – it is a choice of tremendous power. In interviews, she said that classical white canvas paralyzed her brush; “it did not want to move across it.” Only velvet – soft, heavy, with a surface “as if alive” – allowed her to paint as she felt. Its matte surface absorbs light like night – and thus became the perfect foundation for paintings born from darkness, pain, and memory.

 

It is from this darkness that her figures and symbols emerge – glittering, sensual, and at times kitschy. Tanihara incorporates glitter, sequins, crystals, and mica into her paintings – materials more familiar in the fashion industry than in academic painting. But their presence is no empty ornament. On the contrary: a sequin on a girl’s body, glitter in a mermaid’s eye, shimmering scales scorched in a Japanese irori hearth – all confront the viewer with violence dressed in a decorative costume. Tanihara’s ornamentation is therefore not an escape from content, but its very essence – one might even say, its escalation. In this vividness bordering on the gaudy lies a brutal truth about the world: that suffering can be coated in glitter – and often is.

 

The sources of this aesthetic lie deep in her biography. As a child, she spent long weeks in her grandparents’ rural house in Aomori Prefecture, where she was introduced to the world of old kimono and ornamentation – both Japanese and that which, over centuries, filtered into Japan from China and Europe. She was fascinated by the golden threads of obi, the floral patterns on silk, and at the same time the spiritual dread of the old countryside house where lights went out at seven in the evening. That childhood perception of the world – sensual, yet tinged with unease – still resonates in her work today.

 

Tanihara’s painting balances between hyperrealism and symbolism. Her figures – girls, mermaids, oiran (who is an oiran? – Oiran - The Highest Courtesan and Master of Art with the Entertaining Escort of Geisha: A Story Misunderstood in the West) – illuminated by the glow of unreal light, are rendered with almost photographic precision. Yet these are not portraits or scenes from life. They are images on the border of waking and dreaming, in which everything – from body posture to the arrangement of flowers – is significant. Her world is a theatre, where everything is the scenography of suffering, even when it sparkles. Through this hyperaestheticization of pain, Tanihara produces painting that demands to be felt – for it strikes the senses and lingers beneath the eyelids.

 

The light in these paintings is not a natural source – it is light borrowed from the art of Caravaggio: dramatic, spotlit, high in contrast. Chiaroscuro – light and shadow – not only constructs space but creates emotion. Sometimes light is illusion, as in This Impure World (2015), where the red glow on the horizon evokes a post-catastrophe sky. Sometimes – as in Child Room – it is artificial, theatrical, illuminating a scene of domestic drama. But it always exposes: it reveals, but does not absolve.

 

Tanihara, painting with “black” light on a black background, is perhaps the darkest of all living Japanese artists. But her darkness is not nihilism – it is an act of courage. Because it is precisely thanks to this darkness, which does not try to be beautiful, that her paintings begin to shine. Let us now take a closer look at some of her works to better understand her message.

 

The Art of Japanese Painter Natsuko Tanihara – Contemporary Ukiyo-e and the Baroque of Suffering, Trauma, and Pain.

 

“Child Room”

– Natsuko Tanihara, 2014

 

In Child Room, we see a young girl sitting on the floor, wrapped only in a white nightgown. Her gaze is motionless, as if fixed somewhere beyond the painting, where our eyes cannot reach. She is surrounded by a theatrical setting of a child’s room – but everything here is strangely deformed, subtly uneasy. On the left side of the painting, right next to the girl, tongues of flame rise from the carpet. Further to the left – a boy in a school uniform, miniature and devoid of real mass, resembles a ghost or a memory. Between them grows a slender tree with a few leaves, sprouting from within the room like an unsettling symbol of nature in a place meant to be safe. On its branches sit colorful birds – oddly motionless, resembling decorative toys more than living creatures (they also stand in the background on a pseudo-stage – equally artificial and still). Strings with pennants are draped across the branches, and in the background – the curtains of the aforementioned stage are drawn apart like in a theater. At the bottom of the painting we see a round, colorful rug and a decorative cup. Everything is arranged with almost mathematical symmetry, yet this harmony acts like a cage – it halts motion and time, trapping the girl in a stifling, evening tableau with no exit.

 

What immediately draws attention is the velvet background of the painting – a deep black that does not reflect light, but absorbs it. The fabric is not merely a carrier of the image – it is an active participant in the composition. Its absorbency emphasizes the loneliness and isolation of the scene. The girl seems almost suspended in emptiness – a body without a place, a memory without a future. The contrast between her white garment and the surrounding darkness is not only formal – it is also a narrative about delicacy exposed to brutality. The light, which in classical painting served to depict divinity or revelation, here takes on an oppressive character – it illuminates vulnerability. The entire scene is enclosed in a nearly theatrical structure: symmetry, curtains, decorations, and the stillness of the figures make us spectators of a drama we cannot interrupt.

 

On a symbolic level, Child Room becomes a portrait of trauma – not so much depicted directly as materialized in the form of a child’s space turned into hell. The little tree may symbolize life that endures despite everything – but its presence in the closed room is unnatural, as if it does not belong there. The fire near the child is danger, but it can also be a metaphor for anger and pain just beginning to smolder. The ghost-boy might be the perpetrator of violence, but just as easily a memory of what once happened. Everything in this painting screams, though it makes no sound – and it is this silence, heavy and thick as velvet, that gives it power.

 

Formally, Tanihara employs devices familiar from European Baroque – dramatic chiaroscuro, pinpoint light sources, the contrast between the naked body and a dark background. And yet Child Room does not belong to religious or classical art – it is a secular painting, brutally human, even sensually corporeal. Tanihara does not paint history – she paints the inner landscapes of the psyche. The objects in her compositions are not governed by the logic of space, but by the logic of emotion: memories are larger than people, birds are as dead as ornaments, and fire breaks out where seemingly there is no reason. Every element of the painting is symbolic, though not in the sense of allegory – more like a fragment of a dream remembered just after waking.

 

Child Room is the first of Tanihara’s paintings in which she directly confronted her own memories of violence from junior high school. But this is not about a realistic depiction of trauma – rather, its transformation into form – an act of exorcism through painting. This very moment – when personal suffering ceases to be private and becomes a universal language – is what allows Tanihara’s art to transcend the boundaries of an intimate journal and enter the realm of metaphysics. Child Room is therefore not just a representation – it is a trap of memory, from which there may be no escape, but in which one can give meaning to what once happened, in the dark.

 

 

The Art of Japanese Painter Natsuko Tanihara – Contemporary Ukiyo-e and the Baroque of Suffering, Trauma, and Pain.

 

This Impure World


– Natsuko Tanihara, 2015, Japan (Kyoto or Kansai)

 

In the central part of the painting we see a group of female figures on the rippling surface of a tatami, whose regularity has been deliberately distorted and “bulges” toward the background. The most striking figure is that of an oiran – a woman with a white, powdered face and stylized makeup, whose presence lends the scene theatricality and references to the Japanese aesthetics of ukiyo-e. Beside her sit two other women in kimono, gazing in different directions, thoughtful and troubled – a scene full of gestures, but also of distance. On the left, right at the edge of the painting, there is a screen – a television or monitor – displaying the image of a landscape flooded by a tsunami, at the center of which we see a mermaid turned away from the viewer. The screen is the only entirely straight, undistorted, horizontal element, in stark contrast with the rest of the composition.

 

Technically, Tanihara combines the velvet background with intense oils and acrylics – she adds sequins, glitter, and a pastel texture, creating a spatial, dramatic scene. The surface of the tatami is accentuated painterly, full of wavy lines that guide the viewer’s gaze from the foreground toward the central group of figures, creating a sense of depth – characteristic of Baroque painting. The oiran, sharply isolated, almost bright against the darkness, becomes the visual anchor, and thanks to the chiaroscuro technique her face and kimono gain an almost sculptural expressiveness (Chiaroscuro is a painting technique based on strong contrast between light and shadow, used to create three-dimensionality and drama – a method Tanihara often employs).

 

According to Nakai’s interpretation (curator at the National Museum of Art in Osaka), the painting aligns with the visual order of the Baroque – we have an “open form” (gestures that don’t fit into symmetry), “recession” (spatial depth), a painterly style of blurring (softened contours of kimono and tatami), and a multitude of elements integrated into a single whole. The monitor showing the tsunami introduces a historical and social aspect – clearly referencing the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, connecting a personal, intimate narrative with collective memory. This element becomes a “window” between the depicted world and the real trauma of Japan.

 

Psychologically, the painting captures a fusion of beauty and destruction: the oiran and her companions seem to be participating in a ritual – perhaps aesthetic, perhaps spiritual – while the world behind the screen is falling apart. The tatami cracks and lifts, but the figures maintain their balance, as if ignoring the catastrophe – a moment suspended between ignorance and awareness. Tanihara asks: how much silence can we endure when the world behind us is crumbling, and we remain formal and powdered?

 

Philosophically, this work is a metaphor for our ukiyo – the floating world, in which beauty and decadence are compressed into the mask of culture. It is a flat theatre, where decorations matter more than truth, and glitz is a mask instead of genuine pain. The painting cannot console – it offers no relief, but urges the question: does beauty always obscure deeply rooted wounds? Is the essence of humanity ritual, ignorance, or perhaps the courage to look into the unknown?

 

The Art of Japanese Painter Natsuko Tanihara – Contemporary Ukiyo-e and the Baroque of Suffering, Trauma, and Pain.

 

“Atonement”

 

- Natsuko Tanihara, 2019, Kyoto, MEM Gallery

 

 

In a twilight thick as velvet, amidst lush, untamed vegetation, a naked woman remains motionless. Her body – veiled in a translucent, pearlescent fabric – appears naturally fused with the nature around her. The woman sits freely, one knee bent, her face lifted straight ahead. Her eyes gaze slightly downward, lips curved in contemplation – as though she were searching not outward but inward for answers. Above her – delicate birds on a slender branch, cherry blossoms, to the right – peacock feathers in deep, hypnotic shades of green and gold. Every leaf, every tuft of grass is meticulously rendered, almost hyperrealistic, in contrast to the blackness that is not just a background, but complete void. The painting falls into heavy silence, and in that tense stillness, it almost trembles.

 

Tanihara here uses her signature technique: velvet as negative space that absorbs light, and a richness of textures – glittering, dispersing, gleaming like temptation and sin. Resin and glitter are not embellishments – they are the drama itself. The woman’s garment does not shine like wealth, but like a wound – beautiful and airy, yet painful. The detail of the peacock feathers draws the eye, but then shame turns it away – beauty here becomes a manifestation of guilt, not triumph. The painting, then, is not about the aesthetics of the body, but about its fragility under the weight of judgment – both from others and oneself.

 

The title – Atonement – guides us toward moral and existential reflection. It is not confession or public remorse – it is an intimate, silent meditation. The woman does not beg for forgiveness – rather, she accepts its absence. Atonement here is not a religious ritual but a state of being: an awareness of wrongs that will not be forgotten, but which – perhaps – she may come to terms with, observing them dispassionately and naming them. As if the act of naming were the first step toward understanding. Toward reconciliation.

 

In this context, the peacock feathers are ambiguous – they symbolize both vanity and suffering, beauty and the burden of expectation. The woman’s body seems to suggest eroticism, but it does not radiate it; she appears absent – as if she no longer exists in the present, but in a space suspended between memory and purification. The birds are silent. The vegetation offers no life. Nature does not save – but it reminds us that everything that lives must pass through its own shadow.

 

But the deepest rupture in this composition – and at the same time its softest whisper of truth – lies in the transformation of the body. The woman’s right leg, seemingly realistic, begins to split as it descends, transforming into something else – not a wound, not a deformation, but into branch-like tendrils of a tree. It is a subtle yet profound metamorphosis: the body ceases to be purely human. It begins to belong to nature – but not in the sense of harmony; rather, as a form of being rooted in something that does not let go. These branches are not merely botanical details – they are a metaphor for being trapped in time, for motion arrested. The birds that perch on them do not fly away – as if the woman were their nest, their fate. As if every burden of memory had found its place on these lifeless, unmoving fingers of life.

 

The left hand, over which the woman leans, unfolds unnaturally – the fingers elongate, fork, resembling twigs. Is this a process in which nature consumes the woman? What strikes here is the moment of self-contemplation – the woman’s gaze is not full of fear, but calm and seeking understanding. It is the moment when a person realizes that their body – that which is personal – is already part of a world that surpasses them. These branches are therefore not only an organic transformation, but a symbolic sign of irreversibility – of guilt, trauma, pain that have grown into identity like trees into the earth.

 

And finally – the thread. Red, like from a torn sweater, it stretches thinly from below to the hand, to intertwine with the branching fingers. What is it? Is it the thread of fate? Or of guilt? A thread of memory? In both Eastern and Western mythologies, the red thread often binds people with destiny, love, death. Here it seems to bind the body to the past – not letting go. It leads nowhere – only deeper into oneself. It is a physical form of spiritual entanglement: the woman is both victim and spinner, the one who weaves and the one entangled.

 

Everything in this painting – the branches, the hand, the yarn – speaks with a single voice: of the fact that a person cannot escape themselves, but perhaps – by looking without fear – can understand that even suffering can have structure. That every wound has its own pattern. That atonement is not the erasure of guilt – but the realization that we are still alive, whether or not we deem ourselves worthy of that life.

 

 

What, then, is the “little goat”?

 

The Art of Japanese Painter Natsuko Tanihara – Contemporary Ukiyo-e and the Baroque of Suffering, Trauma, and Pain.

“SADO”

- Natsuko Tanihara, 2015

 

At the center of the painting SADO, we see a girl in a black-and-red kimono with an intricate pattern, seated before a golden byōbu screen, whose rich, undulating landscape composition evokes the classical painting of the Rinpa school. On her lap rests a naked, half-living mermaid – her long, white body with red scale accents stretches across nearly the entire painting. The girl, emotionless, almost ritually, cuts into the mermaid’s body, gazing impassively downward, as if she herself is unsure whether she is enacting revenge or performing a sacrifice.

 

The scene is surrounded by richly ornamented objects: golden vessels, ceremonial bowls, scattered pearls, open boxes of incense, elaborate embroidery, flowers, as well as fragments of food and porcelain – each object seems to carry symbolic weight. The scene is set in rich, almost baroque decorativeness, but also against a black velvet background that absorbs light and lends the composition dramatic depth.

 

Tanihara applies here her characteristic technique: velvet as background that reflects no light, imparting not only the aesthetic of night but also a sense of spiritual void. On this ground shimmer layers of oil paint, pastels, glitter, sequins, metallic flakes, and resin, creating an effect of flickering, almost hypnotic texture. The composition draws on the classical structure of Japanese scenes (the screen as a world-frame) but is interrupted by a brutal gesture – the act of cutting, which severs not only the mermaid but also the painterly harmony. The color palette blends gold, black, white, and red – colors of ritual, violence, and sacrality. Equally important is the disharmony of scale and perspective: the mermaid’s body elongated and unnatural, the objects too numerous and too vivid – as though the depicted world were a dream or hallucination.

 

SADO is not merely a painting – it is a sacrificial scene, a ritual that fuses beauty with violence, myth with corporeality. The girl, seemingly emotionless, performs the act of cutting, which may be read as a reckoning with her own identity – the mermaid as a symbol of feminine mystery, desire, but also otherness and monstrosity, becomes the victim. Is the girl killing in her what is magical, fantastic, inhuman? Or – conversely – is she trying through this act to become someone new, to cleanse herself of “fairy tale,” of illusion? Or perhaps she is killing that part of herself which is human and delicate, naïve and innocent? The part others so easily wound?

 

The golden screen in the background – a classical symbol of Japanese beauty, harmony, and prestige – contrasts with the brutality of the cutting act. As if Tanihara were saying: beneath the surface of tradition and gold there is always a wound. The mermaid’s body, white and scaled like porcelain, is profaned – this is an act that breaks the silence, violates the taboo, but also provokes the question: who has the right to transformation, and who is forced into sacrifice?

 

All the objects in the foreground – food, incense, embroidery, ornaments – echo traditional Japanese rituals, but also their caricature. They resemble offerings placed on a household altar – only here, it is unclear who is the deity, and who is the dead. What was meant to be beautiful becomes heavy, too intense, too glittering – as if the decoration had begun to suffocate life.

 

SADO is one of Tanihara’s strongest and most unsettling works – a painting that, on the formal level, captivates, but on the symbolic level – disturbs and provokes. It is not only a tale of violence and transformation, but also a reflection that beauty – if left unquestioned – can become a form of cruelty. The mermaid is not a mythological creature – she is femininity itself: other, alien, cut open before our eyes. And the girl with the knife? She is each of us – the one who watches, perhaps scorns, but cannot look away.

 

The Art of Japanese Painter Natsuko Tanihara – Contemporary Ukiyo-e and the Baroque of Suffering, Trauma, and Pain.

 

The Shadow of Ukiyo-e, the Spirit of the Baroque

 

The work of Natsuko Tanihara is not merely painting – it is a kind of ritual, a dark spectacle performed after catastrophe. Her canvases – though often shimmering with glitter, sequins, and light – grow out of the deep melancholy of Japanese ukiyo-e tradition. But not the cheerful one, known from themes of girls in kimono and blooming cherry blossoms, rather the original, painful one – hidden at the roots of the very word ukiyo (浮世 / 憂き世), meaning “the world of sorrow” or “fleeting suffering.” In this context, critic Nakai Yasuyuki rightly calls her “the contemporary heir to Iwasa Matabei,” whose dramatic illustrations, such as The Tale of Yamanaka Tokiwa, are full of crime, suicide, and ghosts. In Tanihara’s art – as in Matabei’s – violence and death are not sensationalism, but a starting point for deeper reflection on the fragile condition of existence.

 

But if Matabei is the shadow, then the Baroque is the blood that pulses through the structure of her paintings. Dynamism, asymmetry, theatrical composition, the drama of chiaroscuro – all of this makes her work resemble the emotional canvases of Caravaggio, Rubens, or Grünewald, whom Tanihara admired during her travels through Europe. Instead of a clear axis or stable geometry – a whirl of ornaments, contorted bodies, fractured perspectives. The depicted world is not so much a setting for action, but a psychological space, a trembling mirror of inner fears. Where European Baroque expressed religious ecstasy, Tanihara reconfigures it as a secular exorcism – a purification through form.

 

Thus, her art stands in direct contrast to the Superflat movement, represented by Takashi Murakami. Where Murakami offers flatness, irony, and an intellectual play with the signs of pop culture, Tanihara reigns with depth – both literal and metaphorical. Instead of cold detachment, we find feverish expression; instead of strategy – sincerity. Tanihara does not deconstruct the image but enters its entrails. She does not quote the world – she experiences it. Her aesthetic is sharper and more risky – not an aesthetic puzzle, but a scream bound in velvets and gold leaf.

 

The Art of Japanese Painter Natsuko Tanihara – Contemporary Ukiyo-e and the Baroque of Suffering, Trauma, and Pain.
 

Painting as Exorcism

 

Natsuko Tanihara is an artist whose voice rises from silence – the kind imposed by social conventions, the one born of childhood trauma, and the one that falls after disaster. Her paintings are not a response to the world but a rupture in its surface: a trace of a generation growing up in Japan after Fukushima, in the era of digital numbness, where every gesture can be both decoration and desperation. In Tanihara’s aesthetic, deep sensitivity intertwines with a refusal of superficiality – it is a revolt against a culture that teaches us suffering must be silenced and wounds covered in glitter.

 

In this context, her art becomes something more than self-expression. It is a tool for salvaging memory, but also a ritual of severance – an act that does not explain or console, but allows survival. Each painting is a labyrinth, where the goal is not to find a way out, but to get lost – and in that disorientation, to recognize one's own emotions. Her works are like stifling dreams – painful, uncomfortable, but impossible to forget.

 

These are not paintings meant to please. They are paintings meant to hurt. Their beauty is poisoned, their form – too intense to be purely aesthetic. But it is precisely for that reason they stay under the skin, pulsing somewhere beneath the eyelids long after we’ve left the exhibition. Because Tanihara does not simply offer us a vision of the world. She offers us a confrontation with what, in that world, remains unspoken.

 

The Art of Japanese Painter Natsuko Tanihara – Contemporary Ukiyo-e and the Baroque of Suffering, Trauma, and Pain.

 

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 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

 

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未開    ソビエライ

 

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

 

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.- Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

Zdjęcie Mike Soray (aka Michał Sobieraj)

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