Mr. Showa Okamura is a Japanese artist born in 1939. Graduated from the Living Design course at Kuwasawa Design Institute, he is the founder of Tokyo based design studio Advertise CO., Ltd. His work have been published in the magazine “gui” had exposed in different galleries such as Montserrat (New-York), Art 54 Soho (New-York), Masukomi (The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan), T.A.G. in New York and ULAANI (Helsinki).

Through his work, Okamura express a fundamental principle of human existence through traditional kiri-e (paper-cut pictures). He use, as the foundation for creating his work, washi (Japanese-style paper), wish as more than 1000-year history, and unique Japanese “chisel” used by ukiyo-e artists in the past. There is beauty in a graceful and somewhat thrilling “incision,” which releases a “scent”, possible only with a keen-edged chisel that is sharp enough to easily cut open a human body. He believe that such unsophisticated beauty is more appropriate for the simplicity found in the presence of just black and the ground color of washi.

For the final stage of Okamura’s work, he has chosen a new method using a direct reproduction process on washi. As a result, he fortunately have managed to come across the discovery that modern reproduction technology and traditional washi materials merge with surprising smoothness.

The “black” of the photo copy machine applied to the washi calls out to him a strange beauty. Therein lies the “breath” of current times heaped up in a old vessel (washi).

With the new technique of kiri-e he pioneered, Okamura create images that express the idea of androgyny through the merging of male and female figures. Some of the images have an almost orgiastic sense of eroticism, yet they are never pornographic or in bad taste. The elegance of his technique is such that the images never become overly explicit, even as the figures assume postures that would suggest all the variations of sexual intercourse possible between two and even three or more figures. The bodies are sinuously silhouetted in areas of sharply contrasting black and white that create intriguing ambiguities between negative and positive spaces as they merge.

In that sense, Okamura’s work succeeds splendidly in his artist stated goal of “crossing over boundaries” and escaping “the old, unchanging notion of masculinity and femininity,” as well as in the ability of these pieces to bridge the gap between old and new mediums with thoroughly satisfying results.