Kuwahara was born in 1959 in Tokyo, and started presenting his works in the 1980s. His works embrace the distortion and darkness of Japan’s high economic growth period, when he was raised. Motifs such as a pig with half of its body turned to ham, glittering imported crude copy products and strange waterside creatures contaminated by factory sewage are depicted repeatedly with smooth flat brushstrokes. It seemed precisely as if his works were evoking awareness of social problems, revealing the guilty conscience or shame of postwar Japanese society. Since the mid-90s, however, Kuwahara’s work has moved away from such social discourses, and his gaze started focusing on more private and internal aspects. Motifs of flowers, jellyfish, or dolls float in a milky-white plane, where specific temperature, languid warmness are drifting. When he started depicting nameless girls who are consumed on magazines and advertisements, sticky weights seen in his work was replaced by lightness. In his recent bright works, a feeling of desolation is accompanied by idiosyncratic happiness.

Since his first solo exhibition “Abandoned Child” in 1997, Masahiko Kuwahara has held eight exhibitions – “View”, “Life and Pus”, “Land Development”, “In the End of Summer”, “Window”, “Sweet and Desserts” and “Only in Dreams” at Tomio Koyama Gallery. Other major exhibitions include “TOKYO POP” (1996, Hiratsuka Museum of Art), “The Japanese Experience – Inevitable” (2002, Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, traveled to Museum der Moderne, Salzburg), “POPjack: Warhol to Murakami” (2002, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver), “Japan Pop” (2005, Helsinki City Art Museum), and “Portrait Session” (2007, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art).