Taishi Urakawa (* 1994, Fukuoka, lives and works in Fukuoka, Japan) works on the question of whether our everyday use of the Internet and smartphones has changed the way we evaluate and perceive our environment. The central question is the position of the image in the age of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Urakawa sees the aura of the work of art, which was lost by Walter Benjamin as early as 1935, all the more in question today, since the iPhone art has literally brought us close today. In view of this, Urakawa advocates a re-evaluation of painting in the age of social networks. Interestingly, the artist uses a form of critical affirmation, which, upon closer inspection, may remind some of the consumer-critical art of the New Yorker 1960s of the last century. For his painting, he uses precisely those image sources that need to be critically assessed: Facebook, Google Image Search, iPhone Camera Rolls, etc. Urakawa creates contemporary landscape paintings and their pictorial spaces using a painting technique that mimics virtual brush functions of the Adobe Illustrator design program are clearly not to be assigned to the natural, but to the virtual world.

Taishi Urakawa's works have been shown in various solo and group exhibitions in Japan, including 2019 in Taishi Urakawa & Namonaki Sanemasa - It's not over until it's over in the Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, 2018 in VOCA 2018 in the Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo and 2017 in Where sensitivity derives from in Kyushu Geibun-Kan, Fukuoka. In 2018 Urakawa was awarded the VOCA Prize by the Ohara Museum of Art. Works by the artist have entered the collections of the Fukuoka Art Museum, Ohara Museum of Art, the Takahashi Collection and the Kyushu Sangyo University.