Liberation Back Home with Tomokazu Matsuyama

Tomokazu Matsuyama,  Liberation Back Home, 2025 Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, Courtesy of the artist

By EMANN ODUFU December 9th, 2025

Liberation Back Home is Tomokazu Matsuyama’s ethos in bloom, a landscape where images slip out of history and recombine like beats in a rap track. Patterns mingle with halos, folklore leans into fashion, and interior worlds open onto boundless skies. Matsuyama frames identity as something that moves, blends, and renews itself. “Home” becomes an inner clearing; a freedom made possible through multiplicity. Liberation Back Home isn’t just an exhibition; it’s a proposal for how identity might operate in a world where purity myths are collapsing and hybrid life is the norm. Matsuyama offers a model of cultural perception that feels increasingly urgent in an America struggling over belonging.

Before we sit down for our conversation, I watch Matsuyama finish guiding a group of SCAD student museum workers through the exhibition. They cluster around him with real curiosity, pulled in by the color, the pattern, the fashion edge, and the ease of his presence. He carries himself with a grounded magnetism I have seen across studio visits, after dinner tables, and at my own curatorial openings. By the time we step into the small conference room with his agent and a member of his studio team, the interview feels less like a formal beginning and more like returning to a long running dialogue between friends. 

Emann Odufu:

It is always a pleasure talking with you. To start off, I want to begin with something I noticed while walking through the exhibition. Some of your figures have noses and some do not. When they are frontal, the nose often disappears; when turned to the side, it comes back to the frame. It made me think of the Sphinx, that tradition of the absent nose, and also how you still manage to hold so much emotion without that anchor point on the face. Is there symbolic weight behind that decision?

Tomokazu Matsuyama:

My initial intention was never to emphasize the figure. I include figures because I talk about human behavior, rituals, and philosophy, but my symbolic references are more conceptually dominant. Historically, especially in Italian Renaissance or Baroque paintings, facial expressions dictate the entire narrative. One gesture or grimace controls the meaning. I did not want that. I want the figure to be an entry point, a signal that there is a human presence, but not the determining emotional script.

Once you add a nose, expression starts to build immediately. Without it, the face becomes minimal, almost unreadable, and viewers project their own emotional state onto it. It makes the figure feel slightly worrisome, ambiguous. Lately, as I appropriate more Western religious iconography, from medieval painting to Caravaggio, I sometimes bring noses back in because those references require it. When I use contemporary fashion imagery or mass culture models, I keep it minimalistic. It is a rule I follow, but I also break it when the symbolism demands it.

What I love is that you have this internal logic, yet you allow yourself to break it. It is like watching an artist build their own cosmology in real time. The show is called Liberation Back Home. “Home” for you feels plural, Japan, New York, the places you have lived, and the internal space you carry. When you say “back home,” what exactly is home referring to?

The title actually began with the word liberation. “Home” is freedom for me, the ability to be independent, to not have my life dictated by circumstance. Migration defined my childhood. I changed six schools in elementary school. Constantly adjusting, constantly shedding parts of myself to fit into a new place. It made me feel like I should not hold ego or identity too tightly because it would simply be disrupted again. And these moves were not driven by dramatic reasons; they were simply the decisions my parents made.

Coming to America added another layer. In New York, everyone is partially something, negotiating hybrid identities. You feel American, yet not fully. You feel rooted, and unrooted at the same time. “Home,” for me, is not a geography. It is a place of internal liberation; a freedom from being defined by one culture, one history, or one expectation.

*As he finishes speaking about liberation and the idea of an internal home, I can still picture the SCAD students lingering in the gallery moments earlier, drawn to a painting where a patterned figure drifts between two worlds. Their reactions stay with me. Something in Matsuyama’s work makes viewers feel both connected and unanchored, as if identity can loosen without disappearing. It is something we have bonded over in our own ways. His preacher’s son upbringing, my own spiritual roots, and the sense that hybrid life means you are part of everything and separate from everything at once. His paintings hold that tension without naming it directly.

I love that. José Parlá recently told me in an interview something along the lines of home is something that travels with you. Your work embodies that. It is always crossing, merging, reframing.
Something I think about a lot is cultural hybridity, not as a trendy identity marker but as a political stance. You are often described as occupying an in-between space, which Western critics sometimes project onto artists of color as a kind of exile or lack. But your position feels different. You are not searching for a singular identification. You are saying multiple identities can coexist without ranking. How do you read hybridity today, culturally and socially?

For a long time, the West framed hybridity as confusion, as if purity were the ideal. Purity has always been a myth. In Asia, especially in Japan, we see ourselves as part of nature. There is no deep separation between the human and the world around us. Earthquakes and tsunamis and natural disasters remind us that we are not dominant. We are a small part of a larger flow.

In the West, especially through Christianity, the architecture of thought is different. It is hierarchical, built on the idea that suffering now leads to reward later, that there is a top and a bottom, that the world is something to conquer. I once read a piece in The New York Times that described this way of thinking as architectural dictatorship. I laughed because it unintentionally described exactly what I critique. For me, hybridity is inevitable in a global society. It is not confusion. It is the most honest descriptor of our lived experience.

Installation view “Tomokazu Matsuyama: Liberation Back Home,” 2025, SCAD Museum of Art. Photography Courtesy of SCAD

That leads me into your use of interior and exterior space. Your work often shifts between lush interior scenes and open, almost cosmic exterior ones. In this show these two modes are presented side by side. What does that dialogue mean for you?

They speak about the same thing. The interior is the psychological space, the curated and controlled environment of the self. The exterior is the natural world, which is larger and more indifferent than we are. Japan’s understanding of nature, as something we belong to rather than something we dominate, forms a lot of how I structure space. It is not interior versus exterior. It is one system with two expressions.

You also weave Christian, biblical, and medieval imagery into your work. Given that Christianity’s symbolic power has shifted in contemporary culture, why do you think those narratives still carry weight?

They are collective memories. Regardless of belief, Christianity shaped the visual literacy of the West. Medieval paintings, biblical stories, and religious iconography have become universal references. I am not approaching them as a believer. I work with them as a visual archaeologist.

The symbols still matter because they are still present in the world we occupy. You find them in architecture, in moral frameworks, in design, in cinema. They allow me to access a shared cultural language. A viewer may not know Japanese folklore or Edo period symbolism, but they know a halo or an angel. It becomes a bridge.

*At this point, his studio team member quietly turns a laptop toward us. On the screen, a medieval European painting appears beside a Japanese ukiyo e print, one of those Edo period woodblock images defined by their flattened space and lyrical contour lines. The contrast is immediate. One image belongs to the Christian visual memory bank that shapes much of the Western world. The other emerges from a Japanese symbolic system that many viewers outside Asia rarely encounter. Yet placed side by side, they begin to form a conversation. I have seen this in his studio as well, visual histories that were never meant to meet pinned beside one another until they settle into a new, shared logic. It is the bridge he has been describing made visible. He is not gathering references to display range. He is performing a kind of visual archaeology, creating a space where symbols from separate cosmologies can coexist, where meaning is carried through resonance rather than hierarchy, and where memory moves in rhythm rather than along a single cultural line.

Installation view “Tomokazu Matsuyama: Liberation Back Home,” 2025, SCAD Museum of Art. Photography Courtesy of SCAD

Speaking of bridges, you move easily between mediums, painting, sculpture, fashion collaborations, public art. Many artists struggle to balance multiplicity while keeping a core practice intact. How do you manage that?

New York taught me that identity is built from many influences. Graphic design, fashion, skate culture, architecture, subcultures. DIY culture shaped me, and so did the idea of making space for multiple voices and aesthetics and histories.

When I collaborate, I do it deliberately. I do not want murals that exist only for temporary spectacle. I work with governments, developers, and art committees so the work becomes permanent, part of the city’s memory. I treat every medium with seriousness rather than as a side project. The goal is to create a language that can move between contexts yet still be recognized as mine.

So what is the next frontier?

For a long time, I wanted a voice in the Western institutional landscape. I believe I have that now. The next chapter is creating work that articulates the current American struggle, the real conditions of multicultural life, not the mythologized version of it. Many Asian artists start from regional identity and move outward. I want to start from the global and move inward. America is at a turning point, and artists need to address that moment rather than escape it.

Tomokazu Matsuyama Catharsis Metanoia, 2024 Acrylic and mixed media on canvas 110 x 151 in. Courtesy of the artist

*As the conversation winds down, a quiet settles over the small conference room. His agent reviews notes. His studio team member thinks ahead to installation details. Matsuyama rests in a thoughtful stillness. In that moment, I feel the echo of the themes we return to again and again. Displacement, connection, spirituality, multiplicity. Neither of us names it, yet it lingers. The shared understanding that home is something internal, hybrid, and always evolving. When we finally step back into the hallway, the everyday noise of the museum returns, but the conversation remains with me. In Matsuyama’s world, liberation is not a destination. It is an expansion.

Liberation Back Home is on view until Jan 4th, 2026 at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia.