Mise Natsunosuke has been drawn into the fold of neo-nihonga (new Japanese-style painting) practitioners, a pigeon-hole he happily investigates but is also troubled by. In earlier exhibitions he has shown complicity with both the destruction and the resurrection of nihonga, which he pursues in his current show at the Kyoto City University of Arts Gallery. It is the essentialism of the Japanese people and the nation as a whole that the label of nihonga implies, and being a representative of such troubles him. To mitigate this, he is pushing his practice from the national to the local.
As Mise puts it, his chain of thought is as follows: begin at Nara, his place of birth; which is part of the Kansai region in Japan; which is a country in Asia; a continent in the world; a planet in the universe; part of eternity. Of his own identity he offers a macro-to-micro interpretation: "human, male, teacher, paints pictures, is protein." While some define themselves and others as "nihonga" artists or "Japanese," Mise instead asks, "Who am I?" To answer that, at least provisionally, Mise paints, and the results have posited him as one of the finer painters of his generation.
God, which with "My God" (2010) Mise starts his show, is a theme occasionally taken up in nihonga in variant forms, notably by Yokoyama Taikan in "Lost Child" (1902), which pictured Buddha, Christ, Confucius and Lao-tzu protecting a child, bringing together divergent religions for a seeming single purpose. Mise's take, however, is far more Catholic and explosive. His imagery hurtles up and out of the canvas, and scanning the surface's often viscous layers of paint reveals even more. Doll-like faces, the Indian elephant god, Tutankhamen, a Shinto tori (gate) erected on a hillside and a happy Buddha with his arms outstretched, surge and reach out from the coagulation.