木村 了子

Born in Kyoto, Ryoko Kimura completed Master’s program in Mural Painting at Tokyo University of the Arts in 1997. Kimura is a painter with wide-ranging knowledge and interest in Japan’s pictorial heritage, including Chinese-style landscapes, Zen Buddhist ink portraiture, Ukiyo-e paintings and woodblock prints. At the same time, her works are unmistakably contemporary due to Kimura’s subject matter, the beautiful males. Her work recalls the tradition of Edo-period Ukiyo-e, with its obsessive focus on female beauty, which she substitutes with images of beautiful young males placed in fantastic settings. Kimura also inserts humor into her work, rendering her male models in a cartoonish manga-style, placing them in exaggerated poses, allowing her paintings to fluctuate between the erotic and the comic. Her works, including fantastical male figures such as prince, mermaid, tarzan, and cowboy, form a unique painting style in which the past and present, Japanese and Western intersect exquisitely.