“There are no defined themes of gender, race, or politics, but the work decants a poetry and passion for the world that ultimately becomes a political act of resistance, a rereading of the universe around us, recounting the aura of everyday life by placing it in an emotional and dreamlike pictorial space."
Executed in 2022, Yu Nishimura’s hearing exemplifies the dreamlike, liminal portraits that have taken centre stage in the rising Japanese artist’s practice. Here, Nishimura depicts a fictitious figure whose blurred and closely cropped features fill the canvas, caught in an ambiguous interval between presence and dissolution. With his hand resting on his chin and holding a pen, Nishimura’s subject appears deep in thought recalling Auguste Rodin’s iconic sculpture The Thinker. Built through thin, translucent layers of pigment, the surface captures what Nishimura has described as the sensation of “waking from a dream… still tactile and raw” (the artist quoted in “Takashi Homma Photographs Artist Yu Nishimura for Marfa,” March 2025, Dobedo Represents, p. 59, online).
Nishimura’s hearing is at once elusive and immediate, embodying the artist’s central concern: to distil fleeting impressions and fragments of memory into compositions of striking psychological resonance. Since 2020, Nishimura has pursued this series of closely framed portraits with remarkable consistency, refining a style that is both formally restrained and emotionally charged. His ability to transform ordinary visual fragments into compositions of profound intimacy has secured his place among the most compelling voices of his generation. Institutional recognition has followed swiftly: Nishimura’s work now resides in major collects ions including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; and the Taguchi Art collects ion, Japan.
While Nishimura frequently draws on found source material, spanning graduation albums, old amateur photographs to pre-war photographs often discovered in second-hand bookshops – the figures in his paintings are ultimately inventions. In hearing, the subject is not a portrait in the traditional sense, but rather an imagined presence conjured through memory and affect. This deliberate ambiguity aligns Nishimura with a lineage of portraiture that extends beyond likeness, positioning his practice as an exploration of perception itself.
“In the end, my image is nothing but a motivation to do something on the picture plane. It is an entrance; I cannot move forward unless a dog is more than a dog, or a cat is more than a cat. Even if the shapes with undifferentiated elements, which are made along a meandering path, once again become dogs and cats, they appear as dogs and cats who have passed through the scenery. The distance between the subjects and landscapes is removed, creating a single way of viewing the painting.”
In hearing, Nishimura underscores his sustained engagement with the history of Japanese art and photography. His flattening of the pictorial plane recalls the compositional strategies of Ukiyo-e printmakers, while his blurred surfaces resonate with the Are-Bure-Boke (rough, blurred, out-of-focus) aesthetic of the Provoke-era photographers Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira. By transposing these visual languages into painting, Nishimura opens a dialogue between tradition and contemporaneity. The result is a work that feels at once t.mes less and acutely of its moment – an image suspended between the photographic and the painterly.
Enigmatic yet profoundly human, hearing demonstrates Nishimura’s singular ability to capture the unnameable sensations that define lived experience – the blurred edge between memory and perception, recognition and estrangement. In doing so, the painting not only extends the possibilities of portraiture but also underscores the enduring capacity of painting to articulate what exists beyond words.
