Born in 1966 in Shingu-Shi, Wakayama Prefecture, Japan. Until he was 18, he lived in Kumano, where he gained lasting impressions of the mountain landscape there as well as of the Shinto Fire Festival Othono-himatsuri, which is famous in Japan, taking place annually on February 6th in Kumano.
From 1988 to 1994, Ogawa studied painting at the Tama Art University in Tokyo, taking part in the graduate class of oil painting there from 1992 to 1994.
He now teaches contemporary art at Tama University and at Yokohama Art College in Tokyo.
Central to Tomoji Ogawa's artistic endeavors is the question as to reality, to the actual essence of things. The attempt to grasp what is real by reproducing the outer appearance soon ended in the disappointment that the concrete subject covered up the inner reality of subjective experience. While searching for possibilities of a suitable portrayal of elementary experience of sky colors, he discovered in 1993 rather by accident the color reflection on a wall of painted wood, and thus, hit upon his central artistic theme: the optical mixture of light reflected from colored surfaces.
In 1992, his first journey abroad took place: to the Documenta 9 in Kassel. Since that time, traveling and staying at various locations around the world have been an important topic of his art, expressed in his Sunrise and Sunset series. These series were conceived by Ogawa
as a continuing, lifelong project.
With his strictly right-angled, open, white wooden constructions as carriers of the color which is only visible indirectly, Ogawa is decidedly carrying on in the formal and functional tradition of the Japanese way of life as well as in the extremely dense language of forms of Zen-Buddhist dry garden landscapes. I
In 1998, he first met René Rietmeyer in Tokyo and since that time, the two artists have undertaken numerous work and exhibition projects together in Germany, the Netherlands and in Miami, USA. Presently, Ogawa is working on various two- as well as three-dimensional series (Optical Limit, Color Tint).
He lives at the Tama River on the border to Tokyo, Japan.
