Kenji Nakamura

Kenji Nakamura’s paintings offer a paradox: they are made of some of the most enduring materials in Japanese art, mineral pigments, gold leaf, yet what they capture is the fleeting, the vanished, the almost-forgotten. Trained in classical Nihonga yet shaped by his life in Kumamoto’s shifting natural landscape, Nakamura paints not to preserve but to trace time as it passes through form. His flowers do not bloom in fullness but tilt in suspension; his landscapes do not declare themselves, they withhold. The result is a body of work that explores how material permanence can be used to hold impermanence. His use of gold is particularly striking—not luminous or triumphant, but subdued, almost muted, as if tarnished by memory. In this tension between lasting surface and ephemeral subject, Nakamura positions painting as an act of quiet resistance to erasure.
This idea reaches full expression in his responses to the 2016 Mount Aso eruption. Rather than depicting disaster, he renders the space left behind: scorched petals, disrupted soil, the fragile return of silence. These works hold no climax, no narrative closure. Instead, they dwell in the aftermath. Here, materiality becomes both burden and offering. The pigments remember what the landscape cannot say. As viewers, we are not asked to interpret but to remain—to sit with the slow aftermath of events, and to consider the weight that fragile things can carry. In this way, Nakamura’s paintings ask a subtle but profound question: how do we hold onto what time insists on letting go?