Artist Statement — shintaro matsui

Shintaro Matsui (b. 1990, Montreal) is a San Francisco-based photographer. Son of a Canadian mother and Japanese father, Shintaro spent his childhood in Tokyo and Montreal. His formative years were spent with his father (also an artist) on a lake. Thus began for him a decades-long and ongoing contemplation of bodies of water and their relationships to their surroundings. For him, water is an element that conveys a comfort in the expanse.

Shintaro’s work has been influenced by Japanese minimalist photographers such as Sugimoto Hiroshi. His bi-racial identity informs themes underlying his compositions — ones that are marked by the inherent tension in spanning two cultures and how those tensions reveal themselves in nature — particularly between water and land.

In his art, people often play a secondary or tertiary role. Instead, their presence is used to emphasize the tension, intersection and scale of the surrounding natural landscapes and seascapes. He works exclusively with medium format film, a format he's nurtured over the last ten years.