“The world is fast for me, so keeping a certain distance from it is more like an instinct that I had from the beginning before I became an artist. I chose to paint as a way to keep a place for myself. So I hope to paint in such a way that the scenery will reach the people who need it. For me as a spectator; what I am looking for in art is the potential to extend the concept of beauty.”

—Yu Nishimura

A poetic evocation of a car mid-motion on a coastal road, Yu Nishimura’s marin drive (after the rain) captures the dreamlike, liminal spaces that have come to define some of the most striking works in the artist’s recent practice—moments in which motion, memory, and emotion blur into one another. Blending influences from Japanese scroll painting, manga, anime, and postwar street photography, Nishimura—among a new generation of artists exploring the poetry of the everyday—renders intimate scenes with a quiet lyricism that blurs time and style. Executed in 2017 in Nishimura’s characteristically hazy, layered oil technique, the present painting conveys both velocity and suspension. A blue car, rendered as if through water or drifting fog, cuts across a winding stretch of highway. The driver’s identity is obscured, their face softly dissolved into a vaporous visual field. Roadside palms sway in a breeze we cannot hear, and an ocean horizon shimmers with washed-out color. Everything appears slightly misaligned, like a film reel that has slipped out of sync.

This quality of visual misalignment is intentional—and central to Nishimura’s exploration of perception in flux. His process involves working on several canvases at once, allowing images to evolve slowly and out of step with fixed ideas. “The transition of the image while I paint a piece is very important for me,” he writes.ⁱ “I try to see the existence of the subject in a situation between the image and the image, in a state of uncertainty.”ⁱⁱ In marin drive (after the rain), this uncertainty becomes the emotional register of the painting. The surface reads not as a snapshot but as an accumulation of sensations and visual afterimages—a scene caught, remembered, and replayed simultaneously.

“The image I want to depict and the image that newly appears during production. My artworks manifest in the interval and depths of time between them. Always, the artwork takes form and actualizes in an unexpected direction, irrespective of my thinking. As the partially completed canvases collect, their plural images commingle, as if falling into correlation, and hang suspended in the interim—like a shape I am ordinarily unaware of, at the edge of my vision.”

—Yu Nishimura

While slightly misaligned, there is a distinct sense of place in this work—specifically, the seaside town of Yokosuka, where Nishimura has kept a studio since 2014. Every day, he takes the two-hour train ride to Yokosuka from the Tokyo suburbs where he lives, watching the coastal terrain pass by. Cars that seem like toys traverse winding roads between steep hillsides and the glinting edge of Tokyo Bay, weaving past rain-slick overpasses, distant ships, and rows of low-slung houses. These fleeting scenes, glimpsed from the train, imprint themselves on Nishimura’s memory—reappearing on canvas with the cinematic quality of a world seen in motion. “The image of the town of Yokosuka is reflected in my work,” he explains.ⁱⁱⁱ “The beach and the roadside palm trees have become repeated motifs.”^iv Yet this is not nature in the grand, romantic sense. Nishimura’s is a “small nature,” shaped by “abandoned woods and vacant land of underdevelopment”—the kinds of liminal spaces encountered during commutes, not pilgrimages.^v As the artist describes: “The small nature in the urban space has formed the landscape of my primary experience. When I paint something, there is always a memory of this landscape behind me… To see the deepest part of the painting, I look for the shapes I know. When I paint a detail, I recall the same emotions from that moment.”^vi

That sense of ordinariness is key, but so too is how marin Drive (after the rain) transforms it. The painting is not a literal transcription of a scene, but a meditation on the act of looking—how vision changes with time and memory overlays experience. Nishimura’s layered application of oil paint mimics the visual residue left behind after an image fades: the motion blur of a passing car, the temporary glint of light on rain-washed pavement, the way a face half-seen becomes more vivid in recollection than it was in life. The car appears more than once, subtly echoed in duplicate, as though seen in multiple frames at once. This doubling invites the viewer to consider the scene not as a single moment, but as a passage through time.

“My working process, I feel, can be somewhat associated and coincide with the shapes left behind after the waves have receded on the beach, or the seawater seeping into the sand.”

—Yu Nishimura

These shifts in space and time reflect Nishimura’s engagement with the history of Japanese painting, where perspective has long been treated differently than in Western art. The fukinuki yatai technique of traditional yamato-e scrolls—literally “blown-off roof,” in which roofs are lifted to reveal interiors from a diagonal perspective—finds an echo in Nishimura’s spatial logic and in the dissolution, in marin drive (after the rain), of the boundary between inside and outside: the car and the landscape, the viewer and the scene. In resisting a single fixed viewpoint, Nishimura also evokes the flattened compositions of ukiyo-e, where figure and ground often share the same pictorial weight. The influence of Edo-period Japanese aesthetics persists, not only in the layered structure of the painting, but in the way it evokes the spirit of the ukiyo, or “floating world,” a concept often visualized in the prints of artists like Hokusai. Like those scenes—where figures struggle against wind, waves, or steep paths—Nishimura captures a precise, fleeting moment in which, despite signs of modern life, nature continues to assert its presence, shaping the atmosphere through weather and elemental force. His fluid brushwork and horizontal composition invite the viewer to drift with the image, echoing the ukiyo philosophy of beauty found in impermanence.

marin drive (after the rain) is simultaneously inflected with a distinctly contemporary visual culture. The hazy field of feeling and metropolitan detachment recall the photographic language of Daidō Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira, whose blurred, street-level images of Japanese cities questioned the very nature of documentation. Like the radical Japanese photographers of the Provoke era, Nishimura explores the in-between, embracing the are-bure-boke (“raw, blurred, out-of-focus”) aesthetic and filtering contemporary life through a lens of impermanence. “I wanted to capture this scene in a painting,” he writes. “However, unlike photography, the subject itself always lies in a state of change in the accumulation of time in the act of painting.” His painterly process extends the fragment into something durational—less a depiction than a transformation.

The painting also evokes the aesthetic of Shonan nostalgia that permeated Japanese pop culture in the 1990s and early 2000s. At the turn of the millennium, the Shonan coast—south of Tokyo—became a recurring backdrop in Japanese music, film, and manga. Seaside drives, soft lighting, and rainy windows emerged as frequent motifs, capturing a mood of youthful longing and intimate reflection during a period defined by the transition from City Pop to J-Pop and the rise of car culture aesthetics. Nishimura channels this atmosphere through painterly means: light rendered as diffusion, time as superimposition, perspective as drift. The result is an image that feels at once universal and deeply specific—seen through the lens of lived experience, yet refracted through layers of collective memory.

“In the end, my image is nothing but a motivation to do something on the picture plane. It is an entrance; I cannot move forward unless a dog is more than a dog, or a cat is more than a cat. Even if the shapes with undifferentiated elements, which are made along a meandering path, once again become dogs and cats, they appear as dogs and cats who have passed through the scenery. The distance between the subjects and landscapes is removed, creating a single way of viewing the painting.”

—Yu Nishimura

While Nishimura’s paintings often revolve around the idea of portraiture, his definition is expansive. His portraits can take the form of people, animals, cars, or even weather. Sometimes a cat becomes a dog or some other creature altogether. “The image in my head does not always agree with the image on the canvas,” he notes.^vii The figure driving the car in marin drive (after the rain) is anonymous, but far from generic. They act as a surrogate for the viewer: present in the moment of observation but also drifting through it, participating in a kind of internal landscape that stretches out through blurred perspectives and half-formed memories.

In this way, marin drive (after the rain) becomes not just a scene but a state of mind. It captures the pause between movements, the slowness that follows the end of rain. As Nishimura has said, “The world is fast for me, so keeping a certain distance from it is more like an instinct that I had from the beginning before I became an artist.”^viii That distance is palpable here—not as detachment, but as a kind of perceptual space, a softening of outlines that invites the viewer to look more slowly. The painting does not demand interpretation so much as participation, asking us to linger and follow the road as it curves away.

Collector’s Digest

• Yu Nishimura (b. 1982) was born in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, and he continues to live and work there today. In 2004, he graduated from Tama Art University, Tokyo, where he studied oil painting.


• The artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States, Yu Nishimura: Clearing Unfolds, is currently on view at the 69th Street location of David Zwirner Gallery, New York, through June 27, 2025. The show follows several recent international presentations of his work.


• Recent solo exhibitions include Synopsis, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2024); Sleep Walk, ARCH, Athens (2024); December Light, La Società delle Api, Monaco (2023); State of Stillness, Crèvecoeur, Paris (2022); Ebb Tide, Dawid Radziszewski Gallery, Warsaw (2021); Scene of beholder, Crèvecoeur, Paris (2020); Around October, KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo (2020); Aperto 09: Nishimura Yu, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2018); and portrait, KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo (2017).


• Nishimura’s work is held in institutional collections worldwide, including the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fukuda Art Museum, Kyoto; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; M Woods Museum, Beijing; MACAM - Museu de Arte Contemporânea Armando Martins, Lisbon; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Rubell Museum, Miami; and Taguchi Art Collection, Japan.

 
ⁱ Yu Nishimura, quoted in Daphné Mookherjee, “Yu Nishimura,” Aleï Journal, issue #8, 2021, p. 12.
ⁱⁱ Ibid.
ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.
^iv Ibid.
^v Ibid.
^vi Ibid.
^vii Ibid.
^viii Ibid.