Koichi Enomoto

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 10, 6-8 pm

Nonaka Hill Los Angeles is delighted to present new paintings by the Kanagawa-based artist Koichi Enomoto. In his second solo exhibition with the gallery, he continues to depict the social behavior and ideologies undergirding Japanese, and by extension, all contemporary culture. Exposed by his dual employment of manga and photorealism, their effects are both cutting and humorous, mirroring the all too familiar internal and external tensions inherent to post-capitalist life. Through exacting detail, rigorous patterning, and surprising juxtapositions, Enomoto’s paintings impress our retinas with technical virtuosity, but also in their questioning of the status quo, embedding them within the tradition of pictorial social critique.

That Enomoto derives his paintings from the rush of daily news renders them dense meditations on society’s ills. In Demagogue (2025), for instance, we see a hyper-realistic owl shadowed by a manga character, surrounded by the flagship letters of the Latin alphabet, “a, b, c, d.” Familiar associations to owl symbolism proliferate in our minds yet run counter to the malevolent ambiance exuded from the painting’s suggestion of a “divine” logos, the power of the Word, whose power can only be broken through routine self-interrogation.

Divine intimations can also be found in If the blind lead the blind (2025), in which a blond urban fop, who appears not to offer anything other than a willingness to lead, floats over a throng of followers, each of whose ‘third eye’ glows like an iPhone flashlight.

If the loss of individualism occurs through conformity, Enomoto also explores its opposite: how individualism is reinforced through the psychic mechanism of othering. In the diptych Before the same sea (2025), Enomoto places a couple on each canvas, each from differing social groups, in front of the ocean. The timelessness of the sea suggests that the gap, literal and symbolic, between each couple is co-constructed rather than a fact of nature.

Similarly, in Solitude (2025) we see a realistic self-portrait of the artist ensconced in a line of manga urbanites. The city behind them and a soft drink are the only other elements that share the same dimensionality as the artist, implying his own instinct to flatten those around him.

One of the core tenets of humanism is that people are centrally important and good, even superior to nature itself. In his work, Enomoto frequently suggests that technological and economic progress, despite its sunny promises, is not always good progress, that there is a fundamental schism between what humans want and what they get from it. Accompanying the collective fantasy that this can be overcome through better products, Enomoto points to our disassociation from nature.

In Kisses from the weeds (2025), we see a trompe l’oeil cityscape on a leaf, as if to remind us that the towers of concrete and brick we take for granted sprouted from the same soil and are subject to the same laws of nature. That such sentiments are transcribed by Enomoto through oil paint, itself an organic and inorganic tool—a wedding of nature and technology—imbues his work with an urgent analog message addressed to the digitization of humanity. In this sense, Enomoto is a salutary painter of modern life, reporting through the mechanics of pictorial illusion the reality of our situation.

Koichi Enomoto was born in 1977 in Osaka, Japan, and lives and works in Kanagawa, Japan.

Recent exhibitions include Mon Cherie CoCo, group exhibition, Institut Français, Tokyo, Japan (2024); Some lights, TARO NASU, Tokyo, Japan (2023); MELENCOLIA, group exhibition, Eva Presenhuber, Zurich (2023); Against the day, Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Natsuyasumi: In the Beginning Was Love, group exhibition, Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles, US (2021); NEW LIFE!!, TARO NASU, Tokyo, Japan (2020); Roppongi Crossing 2019: Connexion, group exhibition, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2019); The 6 Way to the Psychic JPN, HAPS, Kyoto, Japan (2015); The Way of Painting, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2014); Graphic Novel, group exhibition, Arario Gallery, Seoul, Korea (2014).

Public collections include the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas), Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (Miami), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), and the Taguchi Art Collection (Tokyo).