Maruyama Naofumi Japan, b. 1964

Born in 1964 in Niigata, Japan, Maruyama initially studied fashion design at Bunka Fashion College but switched to the path of a painter as he was riveted by fine art. In 1992 he made his debut as a painter with abstract paintings featuring organic images at A Perspective on Contemporary Art Among the Figures, a group exhibition held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. They were done in staining technique in which diluted acrylic paint is allowed to spread and run on an unprimed wooden canvas. It was there that he arrested overwhelming attention and received high praise. From early on, his art was often interpreted in comparison with artists of Post-Painterly Abstraction like Morris Louis who attempted and spread stain painting. His works also tended to be interpreted in relation to Morotai painting style (hazy or vague style, 朦朧體) that is used to depict air or light using impasto while excluding any lines in Japanese ink-wash painting of the 19^th century. On the contrary, his recent paintings are hard to pigeonhole by their facture alone. They are comprehended based on theories of post-modernism that raised questions over the absoluteness sought after by modernism and are opposed to the universalization of culture. An indeterminate state of ever-changing by happenstance in the environment is perhaps a territory with an ambiguous boundary that Maruyama mentioned.

There are no lines distinguishing things from their backgrounds in Naofumi Maruyama’s paintings. He has intentionally eschewed any concrete portrayal of figures and things by depicting their images with blurred light and shade and subtle change in colors. Lines are necessary in painting to distinguish and perceive objects. Without them, however, the borders between objects and their backgrounds become blurred, causing objects to seem like misty images and thereby weakening their realistic representations. In contrast, such dim images help to stress the reality of an object as they call to mind “that person” or “that moment” which is being kept in the memories of viewers. That is, he is not visually representing things before his eyes but constituting his perception of being that cannot be represented by any representation itself. This is to perceive temporary existence in the passage of time or one’s self that exists in an arena where it cannot be controlled.