Hiroshi Senju

By: Joseph Jacobs

June 2007

Senju is hardly new on the scene. Born and raised in Tokyo, where he received a Ph.D. in art from

Hiroshi Senju, “Falling Blue,” 2006, pure pigment on rice paper mounted on board.

the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Senju represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1995, winning an honorable mention. While he is widely collected and shown in Japan, he is less known in America, despite painting nine months out of the year in a studio in Pleasantville, New York, just north of Manhattan. (He spends the remainder of the year in Tokyo.)

His art reflects this geographical and cultural duality, for his approach combines ancient Japanese painting practices with modern Western imagery. Following a 1,000-year-old Japanese tradition, the artist makes his own pigments, which he derives from such natural sources as minerals, seashells and corals and suspends in an animal-hide glue. His surface is a delicate hand-screened Japanese rice paper, but his imagery has a formalistic boldness that is distinctly modern and more associated with the West than with Japan. His most popular image since 1995 is undoubtedly the waterfall, which forcefully presses up to the surface of his works. His imagery is hardly decorative; instead it is filled with mystical light and color and a magisterial sense of omnipotent universal forces. Ultimately, his work knows no national borders.