M’onma

Born in 1951 on the island of Hokkaido, Japan, M’onma is an artist inspired to create by spiritual impulse—in fact, he does not remember the act of creating his works at all. The artist’s early work consists of conceptual sketches, often still-lifes employing traditional techniques. However, M’onma’s style underwent a profound shift in his twenties after a spiritual episode—he describes a divine presence inhabiting him in his studio one day and guiding his hand. After relinquishing complete intellectual control and entering a trance-like state, M’onma awoke to a non-representational drawing unlike any he had produced before. He quit his job and returned to his birthplace of Hokkaido, known for its number of Shinto Temples, and continued to draw in the mountains until he felt the spirit reinhabit his body some twenty years later.

Otherworldly creatures loom in the foreground of M’onma’s drawings, created with intricately applied colored pencil, pastels, and graphite on paper. Many figures are distorted but stop short of grotesque, defying a simple categorization of good or evil. Instead, they seem to emerge from another world altogether, where Shinto and Christian symbols do not reference either religion, and language makes no attempt to communicate. In this way, M’onma appropriates familiar images and revokes their ability to symbolize; thus, they fail to serve their conventional function. By giving himself over to the unrestricted flow of images that he captures in his drawings, M’onma believes that he is channeling a divine spirit and depicting scenes from that entity’s universe, rather than his own.