Keishi Sakurai1974~ 桜井敬史

SAKURAI Keishi is a contemporary Japanese-style (nihonga) painter born in 1974 in Gunma Prefecture. He graduated from the Department of Japanese Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts in 1999, and was selected the same year for the 84th Reborn Inten exhibition. In 2004 he received the Grand Prize at the Sesshu no Sato Soja Sumi-Saiga Open Exhibition and the Grand Prize at the Maeda Seison Memorial Exhibition. As a member of the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Art Institute), he is known for a site-specific working method in which he eschews cameras and instead spends many hours sketching repeatedly on location. His tranquil paintings of townscapes and landscapes, rendered with foil and mineral pigments, evoke the accumulation of time.