TENMYOUYA Hisashi is a contemporary artist who fuses traditional Japanese painting with modern street culture and anime-influenced sensibilities, advocating his own distinctive aesthetic known as “BASARA.” Referring to his style as “Neo Nihonga,” he has pursued flamboyant, disruptive, and intensely decorative forms of expression as a counterpoint to the authoritarian conventions of the established Nihonga world.

While Tenmyouya’s practice is centered on hand-painted works, he has also produced numerous pieces using contemporary printmaking techniques. In these works, the samurai, dragons, and mechanical motifs he depicts gain an even more forceful, iconic presence through the flat planes of color and sharply defined contours unique to printmaking.

The concept of “BASARA” that he champions derives from the medieval social ethos of basara during the Nanboku-cho period, signifying an extravagant and excessive aesthetic that openly defies established authority. In his prints, Tenmyouya reactivates—within a contemporary context—the kind of visual impact that ukiyo-e once delivered to the townspeople of Edo. By incorporating symbols from subcultures such as tattoo art and graffiti into traditional compositional frameworks, he deliberately seeks to dissolve the boundary between high art and popular culture.

For Tenmyouya, printmaking is also an effective medium for presenting his imagery as a “form” or “template” and enabling its dissemination. By re-objectifying and refining the overwhelming density of brushwork found in his paintings through the printmaking process, his images are transformed into graphics that are more symbolic and imbued with a certain sense of divinity. His stance—viewing tradition not as something merely to be inherited, but as a weapon for surviving the battlefield of the contemporary world—resonates powerfully with the inherent dynamism of printmaking as a technology of reproduction.