Jave Yoshimoto creates brilliantly-colored gouache paintings that infuse traditional japanese prints with contemporary depictions of modern disasters. He entices his viewers with stunning, colored-block images and captures their undivided attention with poignant depictions of destruction, both natural and manmade. He works in a graphic style reminiscent of Japanese Manga, loading his work with the saturated imagery and emotion often associated with modern-day media coverage of such events. Born in Japan to Chinese parents, but raised in America, Yoshimoto often explores the convergence of tradition and contemporary society in his work and is influenced by pop culture in America, China, and Japan. Yoshimoto created a series of paintings addressing environmental destruction by humans. In “Evanescent Encounter,” he paints a blood-red sky above a sea of swirling toxic color leaking from an offshore oil rig that burns in the distance. He depicts a man attempting to remove pools of crude oil from the shore, as an oil-soaked pelican and Godzilla look on. In another work in the series, he presents two mermaids on a beach that is heavily saturated with garbage, material waste and deceased wildlife. In these works, Godzilla, who is often used by Yoshimoto to represent himself, appears to be as powerless as the other victims of the unfolding disaster, despite his size and power. This feeling of powerlessness is put into words in “Evanescent Encounter,” as Yoshimoto asks and answers a haunting question: “Where would you possibly go? I am seeking a changeless place.” In his most monumental work in the disaster series, Yoshimoto created a 30-foot scroll entitled, “Baptism of Concrete Estuary,” whose alarming juxtaposition of the idyllic and the disastrous contrasts brilliantly-colored landscapes with scenes of the destruction caused by the tsunami and earthquake in Northeastern Japan. In other works, the source of the disaster is more ambiguous, but the havoc unleashed is every bit as dramatic. Both a nod to his cultural heritage and an introspective look into humanity in the face of natural and man-made disaster, Yoshimoto’s paintings are beautiful and thoughtful studies of reciprocal destruction between people and the natural environment.