Kazuhiro Aihara is a Japanese digital artist based in Tokyo who paints directly onto the Photoshop art board, treating unfinished lines and glitches as part of the finished work rather than flaws.His practice spans the abstract portraits of faxce, the liquid pixel animations of PSY, and a GIF series reworking meme culture that he calls Bouncy Face Killas.
Aihara is self-taught, having begun studying graphic design on his own around 2005 before starting a professional career in advertising, fashion and interior design in 2010.,His posters entered the permanent collections of the Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art & Design in Japan and the National Moravian Gallery in the Czech Republic, and were shown at poster biennials in Moscow, Brno and Lahti. Between 2019 and 2020 he produced the first campaign visuals for a collaboration between the fashion brand Sacai and Nike Global, and he made artwork and merchandise for acts signed to Warner Music and Universal Music Group.
He minted his first digital work, 100:(, in 2021 and moved his practice onto platforms including Hic et Nunc, Foundation and SuperRare. In PSY, liquid pixel animations such as PSY05_EDIT03 link fluid motion to ideas of the human and the sexual, while his faxce portraits are built by deconstructing and reconstructing facial features through improvised, intuitive mark-making, sometimes drawn with the pen in his non-working hand.His Bouncy Face Killas series reworks the smiley face, a recurring motif in graphic design history, into GIFs built from deliberately introduced glitches and color errors.In 2023 he made DPSY21, a work combining a display panel, acrylic and wood with an NFT, which he showed at CURATION⇄FAIR Tokyo in 2024.
Aihara describes his working method through the term “Art Athlete-ism”, drawing on years spent snowboarding to frame art-making as a competitive discipline in which he works daily to fix mistakes and improve. He has said he tries not to work from direct references to other artists, citing instead a wider set of influences that includes the filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, the writer and director Shuji Terayama and the designer Rei Kawakubo.
