Award-winning Iranian artist Mansour Kordbacheh has lived in Japan for 21 years and feels the weight of it on his shoulders.
"I carry the expectations of 70 million Iranians and I need to give something back to 130 million Japanese," the 46-year-old father of two said with a smile during a recent interview.
Born in 1964 in Tehran, Kordbacheh started studying art when he was 14. Since moving to Japan in 1988, he has won more than a dozen prizes for his paintings, and has been selected multiple times to display his work in the Nikaten art exhibition, one of Japan's oldest and largest, and the Japan Fine Arts Exhibition.
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