Born in Kanagawa in 1989.
He received a BFA in Oil Painting from the Tokyo University of the Arts Graduate School of Fine Art in 2012. In the same year, he was selected for Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi 2012, where he received the Tomio Koyama Award and the Audience Award. He held solo exhibitions at Tomio Koyama Gallery in 2013 and 2014. In 2014, his first museum exhibition, “The Whereabouts of Painting,” was held at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.
In July 2015, he went missing at sea off the coast of Kagawa and passed away at the age of 25.

Posthumous solo exhibitions include Koji Nakazono: Gaien – The Scenery I Wanted to See at Yokosuka Museum of Art, Kanagawa (2018), and Koji Nakazono: Soulmate at Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa (2023).

Major group exhibitions include DESIRE: A Revision from the 20th Century to the Digital Age at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); MOT Collection Part 1: I’m Home / Pleased to Meet You at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo (2019); 7th Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art: Clouds ⇄ Forests, at New Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (2017); Japanorama: New Vision of Japan Since 1970 at Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz (2017); and NEW VISION SAITAMA 5: The Body Emerging at the Saitama Museum of Modern Art, Saitama (2016).

His works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Takamatsu Art Museum; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

Nakazono’s work is remarkable not only for the sheer number of works he produced at such a young age, but also for the extraordinary range of expression found across them. His oeuvre spans from painterly works animated by rich, sweeping brushstrokes that seem to dance across the canvas to intensely charged compositions in which floods of crayon lines and colors surge toward the viewer with an almost obsessive force. He also employed various media like linen, board and canvas. By enveloping the picture plane in abstract fields of color, he restricts the depth of the background. Through the layered arrangement of multiple motifs, including his distinctive anthropomorphic figures, he constructs a pictorial space that create a sense of depth and spatiality within a deliberately limited field. Wavering motifs come to acquire images, and once they do they start flickering again. Adventurous, idiosyncratic and rich landscapes appear. The resulting scenes are richly evocative and almost adventurous in nature: shimmering motifs momentarily coalesce into recognizable images, only to seem on the verge of dissolving and shifting once again.

8/ tv documentary video at Koji Nakazono exhibition, 2014
https://vimeo.com/101279295
*This video has sounds. Please note the volume may be large.

director : Masaya Suzuki
filmed by : Shintaro Yamanaka
music by : yuichi NAGAO
presented by : Shibuya Hikarie 8/