Kamiya Shunpei

Shunpei Kamiya was born in Yokohama and studied economics at Aoyama Gakuin University. He worked for a textile manufacturer while he learned to draw, then completed the 19th through 21st terms of Illustration Aoyama Juku. In 2018 he received the Sutome Keiko Award at the Peters Gallery competition; his 21st-term graduation exhibition took the top prize. He was selected in the 17th Tokyo Illustrators Society open call and is a TIS member. Acrylic and Photoshop are the usual tools. Gallery House Maya lists Edward Hopper and Makoto Wada among the artists he looks at, and his own list of favourite films includes A Woman Ascends the Stairs, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, and Linda Linda Linda.

He draws people and rooms with a dry humour that never quite tips into parody. Book and magazine work now takes most of the week: covers for Music Magazine’s 2010–2024 guidebook, the jacket for Goto Takumi’s Anshin dekiru otoko, pictures for TRANSIT’s Mongolia issue, the cover of Kawarimono-tachi no himitsu kichi for the National Museum of Ethnology, character work for Gentosha, and the DVD package for YUKI’s trance/forme tour. In 2024 and again in January 2026 he appeared as a graduate guest at Aoyama Juku information sessions — a former student talking, not a claim that he runs the school’s brush-up course.

In a 2019 Japan Creators essay he set out a method that is still useful. He waits until a picture is nearly whole in the head before he starts. He gathers photographs for wrinkles, animals and buildings, then refuses to copy the camera’s already-chosen angle. Roughs in pencil decide shape and viewpoint; colour is assigned from a separate palette, often about three hues, with light and dark doing as much work as hue. The point, he wrote, is 異化: to look at a familiar street as if you had just woken from a nap. “I want to enjoy simply drawing a picture,” he said, borrowing the name of illustration so that a single still image still has somewhere to live. The pictures keep that invitation open.