Event | Artist Talk: Tomokazu Matsuyama with Sharon Matt Atkins

New York, NY – November 21, 2025 – On November 20, the Liu Shiming Art Foundation hosted an artist talk featuring Tomokazu Matsuyama in conversation with Sharon Matt Atkins, Deputy Director for Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The program formed part of the Foundation’s ongoing public programming, which situates contemporary artistic practice in dialogue with the legacy of Liu Shiming and broader questions of cultural heritage and artistic transmission.

Opening the evening, the Foundation framed the conversation around shared concerns that connect Matsuyama’s work with Liu Shiming’s practice, including cultural convergence, lived experience, and the ways artists negotiate identity across historical and social contexts. While Liu Shiming developed his visual language through a lifetime of work within China, his practice similarly reflects a dialogue between multiple traditions, shaped by institutional environments and cultural memory rather than geographic mobility alone.

Matsuyama reflected on his own trajectory from Japan to California and New York, describing his artistic identity as something that emerged through transition rather than intention. Drawing from Japanese painting, Western art history, commercial design, and popular media, he spoke about working through accumulation and sampling, allowing references to layer until new meanings surface. “The painting has to be a questionnaire,” Matsuyama noted, “rather than a big statement.”

The discussion also addressed Matsuyama’s public art practice and his interest in reaching audiences beyond institutional spaces. Speaking about murals and large-scale installations, he emphasized that public work must be translated to its context, shaped by local history and collective experience rather than simply scaled up from the studio.

In the closing portion of the talk, Matsuyama addressed mentorship and support for emerging artists, a theme closely aligned with the Liu Shiming Art Foundation’s mission. Reflecting on his early years in New York, he described his studio as a platform designed to support long-term artistic development, underscoring the importance of building sustainable structures rather than focusing solely on individual success.

The evening concluded with an engaged Q and A session, reinforcing the Foundation’s role as a space for dialogue across generations, cultures, and artistic disciplines.