Artemis Art is pleased to announce our collaboration with award-winning Japanese photographer Shinya Masuda to showcase his fine art photography works from the Hanafuda Shouzoku series that has garnered the artist accolades from the international fine art photography community.

Each of the works included in the collection are available for purchase as limited edition prints (editions of 5), with the next available edition indicated under the respective titles below. Pricing for the prints are according to the edition, and each addition is sold in sequence. Artemis Art’s showcase of the series includes ten works from the Hanafuda Shouzoku series. For any additional information, contact us via email at [email protected].  

The Hanafuda Shouzoku series is steeped in Japanese culture and is inspired by what had happened to the artist some years ago. The idea for this body of work occured to Shinya when he discovered that food inside a box that his mother had sent him from his hometown had gone rotten. There were feelings of guilt, remorse, and sadness at the discovery coupled with thoughts of his mother’s affection and love towards him. The process of food rotting and losing its form is something often taken for granted, but Shinya strongly felt that he wanted to express my mother’s love in some form.

In the series, the rotten food is likened to dead souls, posed to resemble designs from the traditional Japanese card game, Hanafuda, then “dressed” and decorated (Shouzoku) as if to honorably send off the dead. The idea to use Hanafuda as the basis of design comes from Shinya’s memory that he used to play this card game with his grandmother as a child quite often. According to Shinya, she used to say that “Anything with a shape will eventually be gone,” something that is quite closely related to the term ‘shogyo mujo‘ (諸行無常), a basic Zen Buddhism concept about the impermanence of things, that everything changes; nothing stays the same. In a sense, this series is also very much a tribute to his grandmother.  

Artist’s Profile

It is a pleasure for Artemis Art to host award-winning Japanese photographer Shinya Masuda’s showcase of his fine art photography works from the Hanafuda Shouzoku series that has garnered the artist accolades from the international fine art photography community. Among the recent awards that Shinya has received include:

• 2019: First Place, International Juried Exhibition, Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, California, USA
• 2019: Showcase Solo Exhibition Award Winner, The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA
• 2017: Winner, LensCulture Emerging Talent Awards 2017
• 2017: Winner, Seventh Annual Exposure Photography Award

A complete list of awards and exhibition experience for Shinya Masuda is available on the artist’s profile page.

This is our first collaboration with the artist since hosting his debut solo exhibition Katsuko at Artemis Art back in 2016, in conjunction with the Kuala Lumpur International Photoawards (KLPA) that year. Between then and the present, Shinya has been quite successful in the various exhibitions, peer reviews and competitions that he has participated in.

As we previously have done for our online exhibitions, a virtual online gallery has been created for the Hanafuda Shouzoku collection, hosted by Artsteps.com. It is best viewed on a desktop browser (Chrome is recommended), but if you need to view it on your mobile device, you will need to install the free Artsteps app (available for Android and iOS). For mobile app users, search for Hanafuda Shouzoku, and you should be able to find the virtual gallery.

A guided tour has been built into the virtual exhibition space, but as with our previous virtual offerings, you may opt to manually traverse the exhibition. Just for fun, we’ve also decorated the outside of the virtual space with trees, sculptures, and other miscellaneous objects.

For the benefit of those who may not be able to access the virtual online gallery, we have created a walkthrough video (hosted on YouTube) that you may view, included in this section of the webpage feature. While it does not provide the full virtual experience, the walkthrough video is a complete tour of the ten featured artworks within the virtual space.