Hiroyiku Matsuura

This is the sort of art I like. Colourful, cute, sexy, with a bit of an edge and showing great virtuosity in technique and composition. The artist is Hiroyuki Matsuura, he was born in Japan in 1964, worked as a graphic designer and manga artist. Love his stuff.

http://hiroyukimatsuura.com/ Not my favourite site because too much flash animation going against functionality, but the artwork is great.

Nanami Cowdroy

Nanami Cowdroy likes to explore her Japanese-European background in her work, and does so with incredibly beautiful results. In her work she mixes ink, paint and digital techniques to come to a very strong, graphic result with elements of Japan and the west coming together.

Beautiful website too: http://www.nthread.net/

Tom Hoops

I've been looking at the work of a lot of photographers recently, and I've come across some really good ones. But it's rare to find pictures that just blow your mind, like the ones by this guy: Tom Hoops. His portraits have a raw, hard, but immensively beautiful quality to them. Look at his site for more pictures: http://www.tomhoops.com/

Chiho Aoshima

Another one of my favourite artists. She never had an formal art education, but managed to develop her own unique and colourful style. Using computer software she creates a world of ghosts, demons, schoolgirls, all in a very dreamy atmosphere. I love the clear lines and the colours are just fantastic. For the guys in London: you may remember the installation she had in Gloucester Rd tube station a few years back.

Stéphane Delaprée

I came across the gallery of Stéphane Delapree (or 'Stef') while travelling in Cambodia. His brightly coloured paintings often depict scenes of daily life in Cambodia, and his colourful cartoon-like style suits that theme very well. See his work on his site: http://www.happypainting.net/

Murakami in HK!

Fabrik Art gallery in HK stages an exhibition of a couple of works by Takashi Murakami , one of my absolute favourites. Colourful, loud and funny - ticks all the right boxes ;)

Wim Delvoye

There is a lot to say about Belgian artist Wim Delvoye. His projects are very different yet they have one thing in common: a tremendous sense of humour. In line with the Belgian Surrealist tradition, he puts together influences that would clash in any other situation. See below...

The original glass windows of this chapel were destroyed, and for this exhibition Delvoye filled them with his version of stained glass: x-ray images of couples performing all sorts of sexual activities. Brilliant work. Not only does he play on the similar effect of light going to stained glass as light going through x-ray images, he also manages to use a theme that strictly does not belong in a church. Below is one of the images he used.

Another interesting project are his tattooed pigs. This caused a lot of controversy, animal right activists are very much against the whole thing.

Interesting was his Cloaca, basically a machine that digests food and shits in the end. He made 8 versions of this installation alltogether.

A version of this sculpture stands on the market place in Wervik, a village in Belgium. Delvoye put the deer in a typical human copulation pose.

Other works include carved wood concrete mixers, stained glass filled football goals, S&M birdhouses etc. Here's a few examples...