Soka Art is proud to announce its launch of a large-scale solo exhibition for NKSIN, the most popular and rising artist in the international art community. This will be NKSIN’s first exhibition in Taiwan since his successful, sold-out solo exhibition at the 2022 Taipei Dangdai last year. For three weeks from 2023/5/13 to 2023/6/3, the exhibition UNRELATED will be showcased at Soka Art Taipei and Tainan, featuring art with the themes of conflict, division, and competition. The artist creates and criticizes these conditions through their unique interpretation.

NKSIN was born in Fukushima, Japan in 1994. Despite not having any formal education in art, the artist developed a powerful, unique artistic style purely through their natural talent and dedication. His style not only enabled him to stand out in the international art community, but also quickly attracted the attention of collectors in merely a few years. On the online art brokerage platform Artsy, NKSIN is ranked top four among the most demanded artists with artworks selling out at every exhibition and demand outpacing supply. His artworks are compelling in using spray paint as a creative medium to create simple, powerful lines and layers on a color gradient. By drawing grayscale portraits of classical art masters, musicians, craftsmen, celebrities, and teenagers across different generations, NKSIN demonstrates a unique art style that fully integrates classical connotations with trendy street fashion. Having been influenced by the American street art and animation design from the 80’s and 90’s, this unique style sets out to examine modern social issues from a provocative yet humorous perspective. The artist creates an ingenious balance between characters and objects by applying contemporary clothing and accessories to ancient characters, creating a coexistence between the past and present. In this way, the real collides with unreal to produce unimaginable effects.

As a descendent of mixed Japanese and Filipino ancestry, NKSIN grew up in a somewhat isolated and hostile environment where be struggled with identity issues during childhood. In the artist’s teenage years, he did not know how to respond to this world. It was only after overcoming constant self-doubt, exploration, reflection, and introspection did NKSIN finally manage to convert his personal experiences into artistic inspirations, hoping to portray contemporary social issues through black humor art. Compared to the solo exhibition last year, this exhibition features more variations in themes and colors. Currently, the artist is exploring the relationship between information and humans by creating artworks that integrate “reality” with “unreality.” Inspired by Michelangelo’s sculptures, NKSIN focuses on body parts rather than the face for the first time. He combines these features with contemporary accessories and electronic equipment to express how reality and unreality interact to produce subjectively artistic atmospheres, shifts, and combinations. He also used colors to mark a distinction between different objects. Some examples include red mobile phones, pink shorts and sneakers, and orange sunglasses. These visual effects highlight the contradictions and collisions between reality and unreality, which imply the artist’s intention to depict conflicts, division, and competition while providing viewers with the freedom for imagination and interpretation.