From Kojiki to Modern Heroism, a two-person exhibition of new paintings by the New York-based Japanese artists Tat Ito and Hiro Kurata, opens on Saturday, February 13th at Joshua Liner Gallery. This is Ito and Kurata’s first solo show with the gallery.

As invoked by the exhibition’s title, the two artists draw from Japan’s earliest narratives to layer their thoroughly contemporary painting with a rich lexicon of visual and historical motifs. Tat Ito has created a unique pictorial style that combines high-color, graphic abstraction with echoes of Edo-era history painting. In his acrylic-on-canvas works, finely rendered scenes of court life, village squares, and columns of military figures are depicted from an elevated, detached perspective. Yet, jostling the picture plane forward and back are flat, decorative passages of Day-Glo grids, camouflage, and other graphic patterns. In the panoramic painting Kagutsuchi (“fire god” in ancient Japanese mythology), columns of orange-suited figures dodge explosions and atmospheric clouds of polka-dotted, Yayoi Kusama-style smoke. The artist describes this approach as “a metaphor for Japanese contemporary art and culture upon which the Western viewpoint is floating,” if not entirely mixing.

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