Artist
Enrico Isamu Ōyama (born 1983) is a contemporary artist based in Tokyo. He graduated from the Department of Intermedia Art, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts.
As an artist with Japanese and Italian cultural backgrounds, Ōyama has developed a distinctive abstract painting practice that explores “line,” “flow,” and “sign” from a global perspective.
His signature series Quick Turn Structure (QTS) reconstructs the rhythms and gestures of graffiti culture and has been acclaimed as a new visual language in which urban energy and painterly abstraction converge.
ACTIVITIES AND ROOTS.
Since childhood, Ōyama moved back and forth between Japan and Italy, encountering different cultures, languages, and value systems—an experience that deepened his interest in expressions that refuse to fit within a single frame. While at university, he was strongly influenced by New York street art and graffiti culture, drawn to its anonymity, improvisation, and social address.
He went on to abstract graffiti-like lines and structures within his own practice, giving visual form to urban rhythms and energy and establishing his distinctive motif, Quick Turn Structure (QTS).
This repeating, organic linear construct has since become the emblematic icon of his work and is recognized internationally.
STYLE AND PHILOSOPHY.
Ōyama’s work may at first evoke the improvisational gestures of street art, yet behind it lies a Japanese sensitivity to ma (interval) and yohaku (negative space), coexisting with an Italian understanding of structure and ornament.
His practice extends beyond acrylic-on-canvas to encompass wall paintings, digital works, and collaborations with fashion brands. Crossing the boundaries between art and design, high culture and street culture, he continues to ask what a visual language of the 21st century might be.
INTERNATIONAL
ACTIVITIES.
Since his stay in New York in 2011, Enrico Isamu Ōyama has expanded his practice onto the international stage.
From 2011 to 2012, he lived in New York as an artist invited by the Asian Cultural Council (ACC), producing works that traverse local street art culture and Abstract Expressionism.
He has since developed solo exhibitions and projects across diverse cultural contexts—including London (Daiwa Foundation), the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art (Kansas), and, in Japan, the Nakamura Keith Haring Collection and Keio University Art Center (KeMCo).
In recent years, he has explored the generation, replication, and diffusion of lines within a global social context through exhibitions such as:
- Like A Prime Number (London, 2016)
- Ubiquitous (United States, 2017)
- VIRAL (Japan, 2019–2020)
- Abstractions / Extractions (Tokyo, 2024)
While rooted in graffiti and pop culture, these activities have drawn the attention of international collectors and museums for works that uniquely embody both “Western abstraction” and “Japanese negative space.”
Collaboration and
Social Communication.
Ōyama extends his practice beyond the conventional art field, engaging actively with fashion and design.
Collaborations with Comme des Garçons, shu uemura, and JINS have elevated his linear motif, QTS, into an emblem of urban culture—bridging everyday life and art.
He also works as a critic and researcher, analyzing graffiti culture from social, aesthetic, and philosophical perspectives in books such as Art of the Street: A Theory of Graffiti Culture (LIXIL Publishing) and The Real of the Street: Exploring New York Writing Culture (Seidosha).
Thus, he is recognized not merely as a “street” artist, but as an intellectually rigorous artist who probes the essence of art and the freedom of expression.
CURRENT
AND
FUTURE
OUTLOOK.
Ōyama continues to be based in Tokyo while actively participating in international exhibitions and residency programs.
He has also initiated new series that incorporate digital media and AI-driven practices, pursuing fresh challenges that connect the “abstraction of line” to the information structures of contemporary society and to network culture.
At Gallery 6.5, we present his work as a symbol of where contemporary Japanese art intersects with the wider world.
