TADASHI MORIYAMA >>> PRESS

Tokyo-born New Yorker, Tadashi Moriyama, in his Bay Area debut, produces animations and intricately detailed aerial views of post-apocalyptic landscapes. Overcrowded, over-systematized metropolises sprout consumptive organs; his breeding buildings evolve into chaotic knots of life-sustaining connective tissue. -- Press Release, Johansson Projects, Oakland CA, March 2008

Moriyama inks overcrowded, intricately lined urban landscapes that he calls the "ancient future." Wires spill from windows, feeding a tangled knot in the middle of a warped city. Urban enclaves resemble dividing cells. Buildings sprout organs that seem like they are consuming one another. Moriyama's work is as much a post-apocalyptic vision – where our material and digital structures are the only organisms to survive – as it is a reflection on the hyper-connectedness and loneliness that coexist in the era of global communications. ---Vanessa Carr, San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco CA, April 2008

In the intricately constructed worlds of Tadashi Moriyama’s paintings and computer animations, a strange sense of home tugs on a citizen of a global world. Movement and change meets an undertow of stasis and nostalgia, only to be swept forward into what the artist describes as an “ancient future.” ---Ingrid Schaffner, Senior Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, May 2006

Besides showing a wonderful large painting, Tadashi Moriyama filled a small room with small drawings, each one a gem that tries to come to grips with a world he can't quite put his arms around. The picture postcard sizes felt right in keeping with a young man on an odyssey. The whole space, with its river of time and space flowing on the wall and floor and its sense of impending chaos, touched me deeply. --Libby Rosof, artblog, May 19, 2006

I made it to five of the dozen or so graduating student shows in town this spring—Philadelphia Sculptors' "Five Into One" at Moore College of Art & Design, "Voxumenta" at Vox Populi, Penn's M.F.A. show at the Icebox Project Space, Fuel's inaugural show and Slought's "The Day After." ...Tadashi Moriyama made a poignant cave installation at the Icebox that was wallpapered with drawings about displacement and evoked embattlement and entrapment... --Roberta Fallon, Philadelphia Weekly, June 28, 2006

Tadashi Moriyama creates hyper-populated landscapes of the future with his landscape watercolors and animations of suburban enclaves sprouting hundreds of houses built directly next to one another that reference the claustrophobic living conditions of Japan or any large urban area in the world. --Eric Shiner, Onishi Gallery, September 2007