ken hamazaki red museum's photostream

With his shaved head, red body paint over his entire body and his red costumes, Ken Hamazaki is known in Osaka’s Minami Senba district as “the Red Man”.
When he was 20years old he went to England, and after returning to Japan he worked both on his own art works and opened a gallery in 1992 in Osaka’s Higashi Shinsaibashi area.
In 1997, he moved the gallery to Minami Senba, painted the exterior and interior completely red and opened it as the ‘Ken Hamazaki Museum of Contemporary Art’ (a naming which in Japanese has the aggrandizing double meaning of the ‘Hamazaki Prefectural Museum of Contemporary Art’),
In addition to holding exhibitions, his gallery also sells interior decorative items and accessories, suggesting a fusion of art and lifestyle.
He is involved in a wide range of activities both in Japan and abroad including his ‘Red Tea Ceremony’ and work with young artists to help produce their work.
In his representative works, ‘Maze Painting’, Hamazaki uses the idea of a labyrinth to depict the outline or shadow of celebrities.
In his ‘Puzzle Paintings’, which often use the image of the Mona Lisa, he paints on each individual puzzle piece, and assembles the puzzle into a single artwork.
Hamazaki’s work is rich in playfulness, and while they also grant us a fresh perspective on images to which we may otherwise have grown accustomed.