Leeahn Gallery is pleased to present Homing In Dedicated, a solo exhibition by Japanese-American artist Tomokazu Matsuyama, on view from August 27 through October 15, 2026. The exhibition marks Matsuyama’s first solo exhibition in Korea and introduces, for the first time in Asia, a new body of work developed following his major solo exhibition in Tokyo last year and subsequently presented across the United States and Europe. Tomokazu Matsuyama’s paintings bring together references drawn from diverse cultural and historical contexts, as well as from contemporary visual culture. Rather than blending these elements into a seamless whole, Matsuyama reconstructs them within a single pictorial space, allowing their distinct histories and associations to remain visible while new relationships emerge between them. The resulting compositions reflect the complexity of a contemporary world in which different cultures, memories, and visual languages continually intersect. This painterly language is deeply rooted in Matsuyama’s own life. Since relocating to New York in 2002, he has spent more than two decades working at the center of the global art world. Creating work within a city where multiple cultures and systems of value intersect has never been about preserving a singular identity. Instead, it has involved continuously accumulating diverse experiences and memories, translating them into an evolving visual language. His paintings neither represent nor simply merge different cultures; rather, they construct pictorial spaces that reflect the contemporary cultural landscape shaped through movement, exchange, and coexistence. “Homing In” does not refer simply to returning to a place of origin. Rather, it describes a process of turning one’s attention toward the cultural memories, inherited sensibilities, and ways of seeing that have continued to inform Matsuyama’s practice across distance. These foundations are not fixed; through the experience of living and working elsewhere, they have been fragmented, reassembled, and transformed. In this sense, the exhibition reflects an enduring relationship with Asia that distance has complicated rather than diminished. The new works presented in this exhibition further expand these ideas. The paintings do not depict a fixed or stable world. Irregularly shaped canvases dissolve the physical boundaries of painting, transforming the support itself into a sculptural element. Within these compositions, interiors and exteriors, natural and constructed environments, and references drawn from different cultural and historical contexts coexist within the same pictorial space. Blossoms appear alongside snow, day overlaps with night, and tropical vegetation exists beside temperate landscapes, dissolving conventional notions of time and seasonality. Reality is reconfigured according to the logic of memory and perception, allowing the paintings to unfold as psychological landscapes in which multiple places and temporalities coexist. Decoration occupies a central role within these spaces, yet it functions as far more than visual embellishment. Traditionally, ornament has served to support narrative and establish atmosphere. In Matsuyama’s paintings, however, patterns, colors, objects, textures, and spatial arrangements organize the composition itself. Ornament ceases to be secondary and instead becomes a visual language through which cultural memories and accumulated experiences encounter one another and generate new relationships. The recurring equestrian figures throughout the exhibition further embody this narrative of movement and return. Historically associated with authority, conquest, and triumph, the horse and rider are reimagined here as figures traversing cultures and histories. As Matsuyama observes, “the rider remains suspended between histories—carrying the weight of what the form has represented, and the possibility of a homecoming shaped by distance.” Rather than symbolizing victory, these figures evoke the enduring journey itself, becoming metaphors for the fluid identities and cultural memories of those who continually move between worlds. In an era defined by the constant circulation of images and cultures, Matsuyama’s paintings draw on the visual density of contemporary life while examining how cultural memory and lived experience coexist and form new relationships. The works invite viewers to reflect on questions of identity, belonging, and cultural inheritance in an increasingly interconnected world. Homing In Dedicated presents the current development of Matsuyama’s painterly practice. Across the exhibition, cultural memory and lived experience are continually reconfigured through movement and distance, framing return not as a movement back toward a fixed origin but as an evolving relationship with what continues to shape the present. Rather than offering a single answer to questions of belonging, the exhibition leaves them open through the language of painting.
ABOUT THE ARTIST Tomokazu Matsuyama (b. 1976) was born in Takayama, Gifu, Japan, and grew up in Japan before graduating from Sophia University and moving to New York in 2002, where he earned an MFA in Communication Design from Pratt Institute. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Matsuyama has developed a distinctive painterly language that reconstructs references drawn from diverse cultural and historical contexts within multilayered pictorial worlds. In recent years, he has continued to expand his presence on the international art scene. In 2023, his large-scale solo exhibition Fictional Landscape at Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art and Powerlong Museum further solidified his position in Asia. In 2024, his solo exhibition Mythologiques, presented at the Arsenale in Venice on the occasion of the 60th Venice Biennale extended his exploration of cultural mobility and diasporic identity. That same year, he participated in a group exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton, gaining further recognition in Europe. In 2025, his first major solo exhibition in Tokyo, FIRST LAST, at Azabudai Hills Gallery, along with Morning Sun at Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center, reaffirmed the scale and narrative depth of his painterly practice. Today, Matsuyama continues to expand his practice beyond painting into sculpture, installation, and large-scale public projects, establishing himself as a leading contemporary artist whose work demonstrates how art can engage with public space and global contemporaneity. By reconstructing the visual signs that saturate contemporary life into a painterly language, he persistently explores the complex tensions and coexistences between tradition and modernity, the local and the global, intimacy and estrangement.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Homing In Dedicated To return is not simply to retrace a path. It is to recognize what has continued to guide us, even from a distance. For more than two decades, I have lived and worked in New York City, developing my practice within a cultural landscape defined by constant movement, competition, and reinvention. To work there has meant learning how to persist—how to establish a language, a place, and a presence in an environment that does not readily offer belonging. This struggle has never been separated from my work. It has shaped its urgency, its contradictions, and its constant negotiation between visibility and displacement. Yet the foundations of this practice remain rooted in Asia. They exist not as a fixed origin or a singular identity, but as a grassroots sensibility: an accumulation of visual memory, cultural inheritance, and ways of seeing that continue to surface throughout the paintings. These roots are carried across distance. They are fragmented, reassembled, and transformed through the experience of living elsewhere. Homing In Dedicated emerges from this sense of devotion: not as nostalgia or retreat, but as an acknowledgment of an enduring relationship that distance has complicated rather than diminished. Figures and patterns overlap without settling into a single cultural position; decorative languages meet passages of abstraction, and familiarity is interrupted by dislocation. Each painting holds multiple geographies at once—the experience of working and struggling in New York, and the persistent gravity of Asia beneath it. Following my largest solo exhibition in Tokyo last year, my practice has unfolded primarily across the United States and Europe. To exhibit in Asia again carries the resonance of returning home—not as a singular arrival, but as part of a continuing movement toward a place that remains emotionally and culturally present. This sense of passage and return also finds expression in the equestrian figures that appear throughout the exhibition. Historically associated with political authority, conquest, and power, the horse and rider retain traces of monumentality while also calling to mind movement, endurance, and the arrival that follows a long passage. Triumph and return seem to hover within the same image, without fully settling into either. The rider remains suspended between histories—carrying the weight of what the form has represented, and the possibility of a homecoming shaped by distance. —Tomokazu Matsuyama
ABOUT LEEAHN GALLERY
Leeahn Gallery was founded by collector-turned-gallerist Hyeryung Ahn and currently operates spaces in Seoul and Daegu, two important centers of Korea’s art scene. Since its establishment, the gallery has presented diverse exhibitions by leading Korean and international artists, including Nam June Paik, Lee Kang-So, Lee Kun-Yong, Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, Frank Stella, Damien Hirst, and Elizabeth Peyton, while fostering meaningful connections between artists and the public. With a commitment to promoting Korean artists on the international stage, Leeahn Gallery regularly participates in major art fairs including Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Basel Hong Kong, Frieze Seoul, and continues to discover and support emerging and established artists both in Korea and abroad.
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