Mixing the old with the new is either great or awful, there is no option in the middle. The Tokyo-based artist Tenmyouya Hisashi is – as he likes to call himself – a Neo Japanese painter.

Indeed, he is bringing together the traditional Japanese art with the Western learning and Hip-Hop influences. He seeks to renew the old with the new by celebrating the history of the Japanese culture but with a new modern lens. In this way his paintings are samurai playing soccer, armour-clad animals, and a Japanese/American street “dance-off.”

Although don’t get him wrong, his work is not especially patriotic since he has a critical thinking. In 2010, Tenmyouya proposed a new art concept called Basara, referring to an aestheticization of defiance, extending from the “outlaw samurais” of the Nanboku dynasty era to the youth subcultures of present-day Japan. Basara is also a response to enculturation from the West — the inflow of Western culture and media that immensely influenced Japanese life.

Well thought.