Shohei Ochiai doesn’t draw straight lines. Not in his work, not in his life. His paintings curve and distort, vibrating with energy—part memory, part rupture. Born in Japan in the early 90s, Ochiai came of age in a country saturated with color, pop culture, and contradiction. Japanese comedy, chaotic variety shows, and the tactile chaos of analog media etched themselves into his psyche. “The 90s in Japan were so colorful,” he says. “The energy, the variety shows—I wanted to bring that into my paintings.”

That color, however, is not just decoration. It’s a cipher. A clue to a deeper engagement with masculinity, emotion, and how memory mutates over time. “It’s all personal experience,” Ochiai explains. “Chaotic nostalgia, unpacking my own background, those are the themes of my art.” His work doesn’t illustrate these concepts directly, but you feel them in the raw, electric surfaces: faces stretched wide in laughter or horror, iconography half-recognized, like a VHS tape paused for too long.

Ochiai’s visual language is deeply informed by his upbringing, not only culturally but generationally. One of the most touching elements of his interview is a story about his grandfather, a railroad worker who spent his life laying straight tracks across Japan. “He always insisted I draw straight lines," Ochiai recalls. “But I had a rebellious spirit, so he thought, ‘I won’t draw straight lines!’” Shohei iterated upon this act of defiance, and with it, he created an electric style. “Since then, I’ve been rebelling against my grandfather,” Ochiai laughs. “Drawing wavy lines.”

Those wavy lines have become a signature, more than a stylistic choice—they are a thesis. In a country known for minimalist precision and clean design, Ochiai's work feels like a necessary refusal. He’s not interested in clean. He’s interested in feeling. In energy. In expression. In distortion as a way of seeing more clearly.

Ochiai’s process embraces this chaos. He doesn’t create with a polished end in mind. Instead, he lets ideas collide, letting form emerge from intuitive marks. “It’s not that I’m going against tradition” he says “sometimes I’m going against my own expectations”.

Though he’s part of a generation increasingly pulled into the digital, Ochiai’s continues to work in the analog. Even when digitized, it feels handmade. He channels the visual overload of early 2000s graphics, combines it with hand-drawn elements, and laces it with memories—half-formed, half-invented. You can see the past in his work, but you’re never quite sure what’s real. That’s the point.

As an artist working in Omiya, Saitama, Ochiai is at the intersection of commercial vibrancy and personal intensity. His work, however, resists easy consumption. It’s playful, yes—but never ironic. It asks the viewer to look through nostalgia, not just at it. His subjects are absurd and tender, messy and deliberate. In a way, Shohei Ochiai is archiving a past that doesn’t fully exist, but should.

He’s not building a legacy of precision. He’s carving out something much weirder, more human: a visual language for longing, rebellion, and inherited energy. Not a straight line in sight.

Credits:

Dai Furusawa, Toshi __________, 8% Tokyo