Kumi Machida

An artist possessed of genuine-and genuinely wild-imagination, Kumi Machida (born in 1970) has made international waves with her austere brushwork depicting biomorphic-androidal humans in states of arousal, communion or both. Machida combines a classical education in the Japanese tradition of Nihonga painting with contemporary motifs to forge a comic-book style, somewhat redolent of otaku culture, that is all her own. The eroticism of Machida's line is offset by a minimal application of color; in fact, usually her figures are all line, rendered in blue-black Indian ink, with only occasional splashes of brighter color, on kumohada linen paper. The full-color plates in this book are accompanied by two excellent texts by Swiss expert Eveline Bernasconi and Japanese art critic Satoru Nagoya, who have followed Machida's work for years.