I found this article on Japanese Neo-nihonga artists Kumi Machida, Hisashi Tenmyouya, and Fuyuko Matsui on the Time Magazine website.
"I'm not interested in drawing with free form, just from emotion. What's interesting is using an established technique, but drawing from your private feeling." - Fuyuko Matsui
That could describe the motivations of a loose collection of rising Japanese artists who are as well schooled in their country's artistic traditions as they are eager to remake them. Tokyo's Museum of Contemporary Art identified the trend with its 2006 exhibition No Border: From Nihonga to Nihonga, which showcased talents like Matsui and Kumi Machida, whose idiosyncratic ink portraits of macabre toylike figures are the product of supreme painterly skill.
You could call these painters "neo-nihonga," a term popularized by the album-cover designer turned fine artist Hisashi Tenmyouya, whose brilliantly colored acrylic paintings tweak symbols of Japanese nationalism and culture. They may be diverse in style, theme and personality, but what these artists have in common is a fierce devotion to the meticulous work ethic of the solo painter—a welcome change for a scene defined for over a decade by the brand-conscious pop art of Takashi Murakami.
Painting: Outside the Lines, Japanese Neo-nihonga art - TIME