Artist Talk: Tomokazu Matsuyama with Sharon Matt Atkins

The talk is organized as part of the Liu Shiming Art Foundation’s ongoing public programs, which foster conversations on cultural heritage, artistic expression, and the shared languages of art across generations and geographies.

​​Matsuyama’s career has been defined by a sustained dialogue between cultures, merging motifs from Japanese visual history, Western painting traditions, global pop culture, and digital aesthetics to reflect the complexity of contemporary identity. Sharon Matt Atkins will trace the arc of this development, from Matsuyama's early years negotiating cultural duality after relocating to the United States, to his increasingly large-scale and public projects that challenge fixed notions of cultural belonging.

Placed in conversation with Liu Shiming, a modern sculptor who likewise navigated the interplay of Eastern heritage and Western modernist influence, the discussion will highlight shared concerns around the human figure as a site of cultural storytelling, the reinterpretation of artistic tradition, and the creation of new visual languages rooted in hybridity. While the two artists come from different eras and mediums, both operate from the “in-between,” using art to express fluid identity and global experience.

Together, Matsuyama and Atkins will reflect on how Liu Shiming’s emphasis on everyday humanity, cultural synthesis, and artistic independence provides a meaningful framework for understanding the contemporary relevance and impact of Matsuyama’s work today.

Date: Thursday, November 20, 2025

Time:

• Doors open: 5:30 PM
• Conversation begins: 6:00 PM
• Duration: 45 minutes conversation followed by a 15-minute Q&A
• Event concludes: 7:30 PM
  

Location:15 E 40th Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10016

Free and open to the public. RSVP required as seating is limited.
Speakers:

Tomokazu Matsuyama
Born in Gifu, Japan (1976), Tomokazu Matsuyama lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work spans painting, sculpture, and installation, organically blending and reimagining diverse elements–such as ancient and modern, figurative and abstract, Eastern and Western. His major public works include The Bowery Mural (New York, 2019/2025), Hanao (Tokyo, 2020), and Wheels of Fortune (Tokyo, 2020). Recent exhibitions include FIRST LAST (Azabudai Hills Gallery, 2025), Morning Sun (Edward Hopper House Museum, 2025), Liberation Back Home (SCAD Museum of Art, 2025), and Mythologiques (Venice Biennale, 2024). His works are held in major public and private collections worldwide.

Sharon Matt Atkins

As Deputy Director for Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Sharon Matt Atkins leads the institution’s Art Division. Since joining the Museum in 2009, she has organized and co-organized major exhibitions including JR: Chronicles (2019), Swoon: Submerged Motherlands (2015), and Ai Weiwei: According to What? (2014). Before Brooklyn, she served as Assistant Curator at the Currier Museum of Art and held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Atkins holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Rutgers University.

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