New York City based artist, Oscar Oiwa was born in Sao Paolo in 1965. In 1989 he graduated with a B.F.A. from the School of Architecture and Urbanism at Sao Paolo University. Oiwa held his first solo exhibition during that time and he participated in the 21st Sao Paolo Art Biennial in 1991. After graduation that same year, he relocated to Tokyo where he spent the most of the following ten years—minus a year spent in London in 1996—until moving to N.Y.C. in 2002.

Oiwa has said that while living in Japan he started using the traditional tatami to work on (type of wood mat used as flooring material in Japanese homes) but during his stay in London he translated his medium to the size of a regular British sheet of plywood (227 x 111 cm). This medium is not only convenient for shipping and storing his large-scale works, but it also acts as a grid for his panoramic art pieces.

Since 1990, Oiwa has held over 60 solo exhibitions including at Arizona State University Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro and he's been commisioned for private projects such as the Montreaux Jazz Festival poster in 2013. His work is held in public collections worldwide, including at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Phoenix Museum of Art in Arizona and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sao Paolo and he’s represented by galleries such as Galleria Nara Roesler, Sao Paolo and the ArtFront Gallery, Tokyo among others.

Oiwa’s paintings depict the impact of globalization through a “coexistence of naturalist representation” and the “fabled-fantastic datum” (as he says in his Wikipedia page) that is found in the “magic realism” of Brazilian and Latin American literary tradition.