A Japanese cultural icon and "reformed" graffiti tagger, Hisashi Tenmyouya carefully crafts some of the most provocative, delicate and beautiful art being produced in Asia today. His paintings, mostly in gold leaf and acrylic, entice the viewer into a hybrid world of Japanese traditions and contemporary world culture. The artist has a deep appreciation for anime, Japanese animation often dealing with adult themes of sex and violence. Images from Japanese Buddhism, linear ukiyo-e ("floating world") imagery, typified by 18th and 19th century masters such as Hokusai, Eizan and Hiroshige, also inform his pieces. Full of irony and humor, these crisp pictures draw on the rich folklore and history of Japan, but also on foreign history and modern life, particularly life in the United States.

American subject matter in Hisashi's art takes on a fetishistic quality, like his Adidas sneakers created for that company at a Hong Kong exhibition in 2002. His "Contemporary Youth Culture Scroll," crafted for his U.S. debut "One Planet Under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art," is a series he confesses was "designed especially for the eyes of non-Japanese viewers." This exhibition debuted at the Bronx Museum of Art in New York City and then traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Spelman College Museum of Fine Arts in Atlanta and finished at the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, Germany. In two short years Hisashi's career was catapulted into the international limelight, culminating with the 2003 exhibition "The American Effect" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where tens of thousands of visitors first encountered his work. Curated by the San Francisco Bay Area's Lawrence Rinder and two years in the making, this exhibition charted the cultural, geo-political, economic and psychological effects of "America's role as a powerful figure in the world's imagination. In this age of American Empire," continues the curator, "the image of the United States has taken on almost mythic dimensions, symbolizing, consciously or unconsciously, deeply held personal fantasies and fears."

In his most violent imagery, the artist embraces the musha-e or "warrior picture," as exemplified by 19th century woodblock artists Utagawa Kuniyoshi and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. The artist describes another work, his "Old School Long Landscape Scroll" as an homage to the "Long Landscape Scroll" of Sesshu, in the artist's words "considered to be the greatest painter in the history of Japanese art." In this painting, Hisashi combines the masterpiece with a game of Pac-Man, a "wildly popular video game in Japan in the 1970's," when Hisashi would have been a young boy. The artist considers them both to be "equally old works of art."

Hisashi's symbols illuminate his sincerity as well as irony, his sophisticated knowledge of Japanese and global cultures and his eclectic personal interests. Some pieces, demonstrate the source material for his smaller paintings, the daily headlines in Japanese news media. The detail in such a painting is awe-inspiring, beyond what some might believe the human hand capable; the chop marks, a figure's hair or tattoos or the splattering of blood are all rendered microscopically, with almost machine-like precision. But right down to the small hand-painted barcode, everything is meticulously rendered using tiny brushes in a style similar to traditional woodblock prints.

Frey Norris Gallery successfully introduced Tenmyouya Hisashi's artwork in the Fall of 2004. This "Asian Invitational" was the American public's first opportunity to collect Hisashi's mature art on this side of the Pacific.