Designer and artist Hiroyuki-Mitsume Takahashi is known internationally for his vividly colored illustrations which seem to resonate with multiple strands of Japanese and global youth culture. Traditional Japanese aesthetics and science fiction, sacred Buddhist iconography and profane symbols, street culture and high culture, the soft, organic and kawaii body intersected and interfaced with the hard, inorganic and the digital, Eros and Thanatos, tentacle fetish and oral fixation, war and peace, all of these seem to find expression at various junctures in his work.

Mitsume has performed and exhibited at home and abroad, including at Japanese pop culture festivals (for example, the J-Pop Summit in San Francisco in 2017). Perhaps synchronized to his growing international popularity as designer of art, fashion apparel and performer of live paintings, the hybrid bodies in his striking illustrations, embedded and decorated with daruma figurines, manekineko cats, Japanese festival and Noh masks as well as kanji characters, seem to pulsate with a desire for Japanese pop culture, connected to a disembodied heart racing at a steady beat somewhere over 140 BPM.

As you may know from his 2015 web comic, “HYPERSONIC Music Club,” Mitsume is an avid fan of electronic music and DJ culture. Highly in demand as an illustrator for electronic music labels (for example, hard style and tech dance label Exbit Trax) as well as posters for electronic and Akiba-kei DJ events, his work often features the paraphernalia of electronic music and the icons of otaku culture.

Mitsume has graciously allowed us to repost a small sample of his amazing work from his Twitter account.

---

To find out more about Hiroyuki-mitsume Takahashi's latest activities, please visit his website here and follow him on Twitter.

He's an artist you'll definitely want to keep an eye on (or even three)!