While the progression of Japanese art within the last decade is being celebrated at the "Garden of Painting" exhibition at The National Museum of Art in Osaka, other galleries in the area, such as the Tomio Koyama Gallery, Kyoto, and the YOD Gallery, Osaka, have launched group exhibitions proposing directions for the next generation.

There are few threads that can draw together all the various manifestations of contemporary art, but the artists exhibited at Tomio Koyama Gallery's "Paintings by Four Artists" and the YOD's "Under 100" exhibitions each suggest approaches pregnant with potential for the coming decade, and they are refreshingly free of the east-Japan influence of Takashi Murakami.

Toru Kuwakubo (b. 1978) made the unusual admission that he sees his work as heir to French Impressionism — a style that is now often unfairly associated with calendars and hotel-room paintings. In "Scatterer with Setting Sun and Mountains" (2009), the viewer can see his formal debt to the Pointillist style of short thick brushstrokes in viscous bright colors. The painting appears hazy, and the roughly sketched figures populating the basin surrounded by mountains are swallowed up by the landscape as if being assimilated into nature itself. Kuwakubo began his painting career by reinventing himself as a fictitious artist, acting out the role of how he felt an artist should behave and imitating how he thought they should paint. Now, the fiction and the reality have apparently coalesced.